





Cyr sits 


‘Harris, ne CY aay 
The religion of . 
undergraduates 








yt if 
i) i 





ety, 


Bh | : 
es) 


4 





THE RELIGION OF 
UNDERGRADUATES 


are. 
oe 
Ort 


, alire 
AY ¢ 









BNL OP PNAC Sp 
is "Tg. 


NOV 141925 


THE RELIGION“O& ww” 
UNDERGRADUATES 


By 
CYRIL HARRIS 


Sometime University Pastor for the Episcopal Church 
Cornell University 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


1945 


Corrricut, 1925, Br 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Printed in the United States of America 





TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER 


“Tf there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it 
not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side 
by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all 
men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories 
of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the 
new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but 
know what to do with it.” 

R. W. EMERSON, “‘THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.”’ 


FOREWORD 


In these pages you shall read of ships at sea—‘‘ some- 
thing escaped from the anchorage and driving free’’— 
of voyages over uncharted seas, of widening horizons, of 
possible shipwreck. You are to find here no labored ar- 
guments, nor hear the creaking shoes of professional 
method. We neither point with pride nor view with 
alarm. And we shall seek to avoid those apparent certi- 
tudes with which this sort of writing often abounds. 
With a determined effort to avoid the tug of accustomed 
thinking, we shall try to understand our young people 
as we find them, and to survey “‘this wide free scene” 
through their eyes. 

In Part I is offered a brief review of the undergradu- 
ate mind to-day as it considers the great untiring ques- 
tions. Evidence for the statements made in this sum- 
mary may be found, at least in part, in the two com- 
posite essays which constitute Chapter III, made from 
themes lately written by undergraduates in one of the 
Eastern universities. With this as a background we pass 
to Part II, where the main business of the book is trans- 
acted. Our intention is there to discuss the five major 
questions for religion in our day as they relate to youth 
in college. The discussion is not, however, limited to the 
campus mind nor to strictly campus problems. The five 
questions are: 


(t) Can religion be taught? (Chapter IV.) 
(2) Can religion bring science to the service of 
the soul? (Chapter V.) 


vu 


Viil FOREWORD 


(3) Has Christianity anything important to say 
to modern youth about sin? (Chapter VI.) 

(4) What part can the Christian religion play in 
a modern industrial state? (Chapter VII.) 

(s) Can the Church give our young people their 
God back again? (Chapter VIII.) 


No definition of an undergraduate’s religion has been 
attempted here, except to suggest that it begins with the 
pronoun I, and ends with a question-mark. However, 
religion is not only a question but an answer to ques- 
tions; not only a voyage but a destination and an ar- 
rival. In Part III an attempt is made to present, in all 
its concreteness and simplicity, the answer, the proposal, 
of that Young Man out of Galilee who clearly knew what 
life is all about. He understands—better than we do— 
these sons and daughters of a new day, as he lifts up his 
eyes and sees them as ships having no rudder. 


Acknowledgment is here gratefully made to all those 
who generously gave time and thought to criticising the 
manuscript of this book. The writer wishes also to ex- 
press his indebtedness to his chief instructors, the under- 


graduates in two universities. 
Cyrit Harris. 
TIVERTON, RHODE ISLAND, 


May sth, 1925. 


CONTENTS 


RR EAVOMD Adel Pe ety ged an dita Cah grat yk ta eeeu hore Vii 
PART I 
CHAPTER 
PRR PALEMAT ES SUV UN nel ape ai late at aN Ung ae 
II. A Summary OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION . 8 
III. A Sympostum oF UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON 
PS ELAGION ON UOTE i bre te rate | Ce tne une es 16 
PART II 
PPT OAV ALLE SITY) 4 Ka gavin tia 4h as Meith ate 29 
V. WanteD: A New HEAVEN For A NEW EARTH 38 
ee ER LIL UIDE UD OR ai os hee gil a ia ve Ul ol Sue teenlps 46 
VII. Mustarp-Gas oR MUSTARD-SEED ..... 60 
Mit emcee ITVe ORNCIOD 40 atte te be Gl cieitetemes 67 
PART III 
Pe LAE OR ASLORUGOIS Wig ts Ae) Wh ce) We ketaod an aay pte 79 


1h! 
, -) 
rye) 3 


Oh. } he 


+ 


ib r tf Py 





PART OF 


“Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.” 
WALT WHITMAN, “POEMS OF JoY’’ 


THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


CHAPTER I 
STALEMATE 


We are standing, let us say, at an angle of a campus 
walk. It is the interval between class-hours. At the 
stroke of the bell the silent quadrangle is suddenly filled 
with color and purposeful movement resembling some 
sedate folk-dance of processional figures on the green. 
It is a varied picture; no single type prevails. Our 
glance turns first to the high lights; one readily recog- 
nizes that nationally advertised product, the American 
college type. (Any collar advertisement or magazine 
cover or cigarette poster will furnish an exact likeness.) 
One is apt to miss, in the presence of these more bril- 
liant figures, those who are perhaps the more genuinely 
typical of the American university to-day: those who 
come from the plainer homes, who are more plainly 
dressed and less used to play. They have not yet quite 
arrived at the easy sophistication and aplomb of the 
others; they speak among themselves of social errors 
and breaks; they take one “culture course” a year. A 
great deal of their talk is about making good. 

Now we must sketch in the shadows. Certain im- 
perfect fruit of our many-sided civilization are here at 
college, the fruit of a generation that is nervously over- 
driven and spiritually underfed. “‘Too much material- 
ism on an empty stomach.” The hang of their lips tells 

3 


4. THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


us that they have never said no to anything. Any effort 
they may make is spent seeking soft courses, dodging 
the professor’s eye, and scheming for the all-forgiving 
diploma. Human silk-worms these, wrapped in a bright 
web of their own spinning, made prisoner by themselves 
and their inheritance. “Here come another sort—though 
these are comparatively few—whose nature and train- 
ing have unfitted them for participation; the unattrac- 
tive, the shy, the solitary, and now and then a cripple. 
Some of these will go out for that catch-all activity, 
campus religion. Others will grow sour and hate it all. 

Observe, too, these alert boys whose darker faces in- 
dicate other racial stocks, some of them the sons of the 
newer immigration, some Hebrews, and now and then 
an Asiatic. They are already setting a pace that shall 
one day make our fat Anglo-Saxondom look to its 
training. 

The great bell rings again, and they are gone. One is 
tempted to muse a bit on the picture. What Is going on 
beneath those interesting faces and those dull faces? 
Where have they come from, and whither are they 
WOUND PtH) 03 

Where do they come from? One first calls to mind all 
the Sunday-schools up and down the land which, week 
by week, have laid their gentle hands upon them. 
Rather persistent inquiries among undergraduates on 
this score reveal that in all but a very few cases Sunday- 
school gave them nothing that they can tell about or 
put to conscious use in college. When one recollects all 
the piles and piles of leaflets, lesson-forms, the aids to 
attention and attendance, one wonders whether any of 
those dry husks had seeds in them. The salt has some- 


STALEMATE 5 


how lost its savor; or perhaps the sugar has been used 
by mistake. 
And what of the family church back at home ?— 


“When I weekly knew 
An ancient pew, 
And murmured there 
The forms of prayer.” 


Much indeed, as many will attest. Though they may 
not talk about it, nevertheless it plays its part. Indeed, 
those early associations are the only religion that many 
boys and girls possess. But pastors would be dismayed 
if they knew of the profound ignorances, the yawning 
gaps, which they had never touched. Here is a boy who 
remarks that the only memorable thing to him is the 
minister’s long prayer on a certain summer morning, in 
which he gave thanks in great detail for the flora and 
fauna of the season—and ended -by thanking the Lord 
for “every blooming thing.’’ That uncanonical levity, 
spreading from choir to pews, tells a story. If only min- 
isters could see themselves sometimes as their young 
people see them! One hears more frequently than any 
other this judgment on the pastor back home—that he 
was “out of touch.” Not only in little things, but in 
big. In a spiritually illiterate age he discourses of liter- 
ary criticism. He is concerned with syntax, structure, 
and style, while his hearers are still at their A B C’s. 
Result, a congregation of empty pews, interrupted here 
and there by an elderly human form. 

What have they got from their parents? Again the 
answer is wintry. Yet what did parents expect, when 
they handed over their children, body, mind, and soul, 


6 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


to experts? They saved themselves trouble, no doubt, 
but that immunity was dearly bought. | 

The conclusion from all this is familiar enough—that 
spiritual contact between the generations has been lost. 
This fact lies at the base of any discussion of the sort in 
which we are engaged, and needs to be stated here, 
even at the risk of seeming to deal in truisms. Nine out 
of ten of these parents ‘‘accepted as read”’ the whole 
body of religious thinking current when they were 
young; it was as familiar as the minutes of the previous 
meeting. But to their children it is all entirely open to 
debate, or utterly wearisome. When their elders speak 
of religion, most young people think they mean a daily 
dozen of don’ts. Some think that the God of their par- 
ents is a stern and forbidding elderly schoolmaster, ex- 
treme to mark what is done amiss; others, that he has 
grown slack and easy-going in his old age. And when 
they are “‘spoken to” about Christ, some suppose one 
means an oriental dreamer, mild and pale; and others, 
the tyrannical Son of an imperious Father, sent to im- 
pose his rule on conquered territory. And they under- 
stand that by conversion is meant a rising up in a place 
of public worship and suddenly experiencing, to order, 
the ecstasies of the beatific vision; and by salvation, a 
collection on a spiritual insurance policy, plus a snob- 
bish disdain for the uninsured ninety-and-nine. 

Current thinking on every campus views all this, and 
all that goes with it, with active distaste or passive 
coldness. The opinion is fixed among undergraduates 
everywhere that what the older generation means by 
its religion is frankly neither useful nor intelligible. Our 
present conclusion must therefore be, that religion is 


STALEMATE 7 


generally being presented to youth in a dead language, 
and youth wonders what it is all about. Stalemate. 
There is no next move. The present game is off. How- 
ever, this is not such bad news as it sounds, for the rea- 
son that while they seem to have rejected the Christian 
faith, what they really have refused is this or that par- 
tial version, some dull caricature, some provincial piety, 
which must needs pass with the age which once it seemed 
to satisfy. They have not rejected the Christian faith 
because they have never really known that faith. 

The following sentences, taken from undergraduate 
themes in the present writer’s possession, are typical: 


“T for one do not see how the blood of Christ has 
saved me, or can save me, from any sin.” 

“The more a man learns the harder it is for him 
to believe the miracles of the Bible.” 

“The average undergraduate thinks of religion 
in a manner to bring pain to the hearts of heaven- 
ward-looking clergymen.” 

“Old ideas are broken up and discarded, and re- 
placed by new ones formed after contact with minds 
that represent the ideas of the age.” 

“After learning in the university courses that the 
old ideas about heaven and hell are no longer con- 
sidered literally true, one is apt to discount all re- 
ligion as he knows it.” 


CHAPTER II 
A SUMMARY OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION 


The average American undergraduate occupies him- 
self with technically formulated religious beliefs about 
as much as the average healthy adult is interested in 
materia medica, or a garage hand in differential calculus. 
It is life that matters; what it is all about, and what one 
is to do about it. 

The best place to find out what undergraduates really 
think concerning religion is in those nightly ‘‘bull- 
sessions” (as they call them) in dormitories and frater- 
nities and rooming-houses. They are wholly unsched- 
uled; there is no leader; no one is there but the fellows. 
They may start with anything and end anywhere. 
Many a boy sets his compass by them, for there one 
hears discussed the real things—the sins and dilemmas 
that one never talks about to an older person. And 
while, of course, “‘the highest cannot be spoken,” it can 
now and then be felt; indeed, these sessions may be the 
only place where a boy feels it actually near him in all 
his college course. 

What do they talk about? Everything: the last 
game and the next one; sex; what profession to enter; 
which is the best show; and more often than not, re- 
ligion. On those occasions it branches out from such 
questions as these: ‘‘What do you mean by God? 
What is he like? Can one know him? Did he create 
the world after the Genesis fashion or the geological?” 

8 


SUMMARY OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION 9g 


Or, “Which is it—broadmindedness or dishonesty, to ~ 
say a creed you don’t believe? Do you believe in mir- 
acles, especially the virgin birth and the resurrection? 
Do you believe in an immortality of the golden-harps 
type? What is immortality?” ‘‘Was Christ sinless? 
Did he make any mistakes in his teaching? Did he 
know everything?” ‘‘How good do you have to be, to 
be good?” “Which is the best church? Why is there 
no demand for their product? Why don’t they get to- 
gether?”? Much of it is argument for argument’s sake. 
None of it is particularly new or striking. 

Generally speaking, an undergraduate’s reason for 
having a religion at all is not for rewards or for fear of 
punishment in a hereafter, but for better understanding 
of the purpose and meaning of life, in order to be more 
useful. The young men still come running unto Jesus, 
saying: What shall I do to be saved? In the previous 
generation the accent was on the last half of that ques- 
tion, ‘‘to be saved’; in this, it is on “‘ what shall I do?” 
The old conceptions of heaven and hell are gone; heaven 
is as empty and silent as a roof garden in winter; and 
hell is burnt out, an extinct volcano. Their going has 
carried with them the sense of the permanence of all 
moral values and sanctions. Most undergraduates 
would agree, if they stopped to think about it, that 
there is some difference between the dying of a good 
and of an evil man; but they are not in the least sure 
what the difference is, or which is the good man and 
which the evil. There is a general feeling that one’s 
final rating can be left to the Eternal Decency; and in 
the meanwhile one plays the game as squarely as neces- 
sary, according to the rules of the biological contest. 


ize) THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


Under these terms human nature is back again on the 
ancient familiar ethical ground, we are fittest—we sur- 
vive. ‘The I’s have it.” 

Undergraduates are, like the rest of us, mass think- 
ers. They “think by infection, catch opinions like a 
cold.” All but the more thoughtful are borne along by 
the tide of custom and opinion, and take things as they 
come. It is considered a mark of respectability not to 
take anything for granted that pertains to the accepted 
religion, and to think that what goes on in churches is 
only a side issue. Some undergraduates think of re- 
ligion as a body of accepted beliefs set forth by this or 
that church. Others have extended the definitive fence 
to include the search for God. Others mean simply the 
formation of a good character and its use in the world. 
Many use it loosely as the equivalent of churchgoing. 
Beyond this they become nebulous and uncertain. Only 
rarely will one allow himself to be pinned down to a 
definition of what he would call real religion. The fol- 
lowing, from one of the themes, while it is a trifle over- 
written, shows which way the tide is running: 


“‘Most of us have a private religion of our own, 
which places honor, generosity, and truth above 
dogmatic conformity to commandments. We regard 
as sins such things as cowardice, meanness, and dis- 
honesty of thought, instead of the traditional ones 
of profanity, drunkenness, and petty excess. Gen- 
erosity and charity mean to us not just giving money 
into the collection-plate, but sympathy and under- 
standing in judging men and their actions among 
themselves.” 


SUMMARY OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION tr 


One sees here the common substitution of an ethical 
code for religion; the once-born, healthy-minded code 
of sheltered lives—a bright and shining “religion” for 
bright and shining hours. It would be unfair, however, 
to seem to summarize the religion of a whole generation 
thus, in a sentence or two. This is only one lad’s way 
of putting it. There is more, lying beneath the stratum 
of words. 

The following summary paragraphs are an attempt 
at a more complete statement. ‘They will be found 
to correspond respectively with the five chapters of 
Part II, where these topics will be treated at greater 
length. 

(1) During his four college years, the university occu- 
pies the undergraduate’s whole horizon, and is the one 
thing that really matters. It is at once an object of de- 
votion and a means of self-expression. Through it he 
gains access to the only rebirth of mind and soul that 
he is likely to know. He therefore permits it to satisfy 
whatever need for religion he may feel. Thomas Carlyle 
says: ‘“The thing a man does practically lay to heart 
and know for certain concerning his vital relations to 
this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, 
that is the primary thing for him, and creatively deter- 
mines the rest. That is his religion.”’ For nine out of ten 
undergraduates to-day, the university (without seek- 
ing or desiring that office) occupies the position of priest 
and prophet, the quickener of souls and the interpreter 
of God. Of this fact, however, neither university nor 
undergraduates seem to be aware. This new secular re- 
ligion has yet to be translated into terms fitted to its 
high office. 


12 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


(2) Freedom from the restraints of home and school 
comes unexpectedly on arrival at college; undergrad- 
uates are wholly unprepared for its risks and tempta- 
tions. The scientific outlook engendered in classrooms 
causes them (among other things) to abandon their in- 
herited beliefs, and if these are later restored in revised 
form, it is because they have survived the new tests to 
which they have been submitted. Students want to 
apprehend theological questions under the same logical 
canons as apply to scientific truth in other fields; and 
they ignore anything that cannot be so apprehended, thus 
missing the heart of religion. The current attitude toward 
theology is, that one must wait for more data, and for 
more agreement among the proponents of the data, 
before committing oneself. 

(3) Undergraduates are ignorant of the specific claims 
of Christian discipleship, for they are wholly ignorant 
of the person of Christ, and lack any explicit, first-hand 
experience of him. Direct reference to Jesus Christ oc- 
curs less than half a dozen times in the themes. The 
‘“‘narrow way’? means for most an intellectually narrow 
way. As a consequence, on the practical side, problems 
of personal conduct do not appear to most students as 
organically related to the religion of Jesus Christ. 

(4) Neither do undergraduates regard problems of so- 
cial justice as religious in their bearing. This is a natural 
reflex of the customary separation of Christianity from 
its social implications. ‘Those implications come to 
most young people, when they first hear of them, as a 
great surprise. Undergraduates are not in the habit of 
looking at society, as et present organized, with a criti- 
cal eye; and therefore do not easily see any necessary 


SUMMARY OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION 13 


and compelling connection between Christianity and 
the social order. 

(5) Undergraduates are less church-conscious than 
their elders. That is, they are not so keenly alive to 
the rival claims and distinctions of the several churches. 
Those who are so, show much the same spirit as when 
they boost their home town or the team; it is frankly 
competitive—we versus you. Mostly they are ignorant 
about and impatient with the ecclesiastical motives and 
groupings of previous generations. There is general in- 
tolerance of all perfunctory observances, and of denomi- 
national disputes, which they term ‘“‘stale quarrels.” 


In conclusion we may add that the central reasons for 
the prevailing coolness of undergraduates toward the 
religion of their fathers are not on the surface; they are 
not the ones they usually give. Their withdrawal is due, 
first, to the wide-spread contemporaneous revolt of the 
natural man from a moral discipline which had grown 
arbitrary and irksome and unreal, just at the time when 
opportunities for self-pleasing were daily increasing in 
number and in charm, and when the findings of the new 
knowledge seemed to lend sanction to just such a break 
for liberty. This process was, of course, speeded up by 
the war. Second, as a result of this mental revolution 
in our day, the tides of intellectual interest are all set- 
ting in the direction of knowledge through scientific in- 
vestigation rather than of serenity and security through 
belief. It is low tide in the churches; the old ships are 
high and dry. But it is flood tide in the laboratories; 
thither comes all the commerce of the new world. 
Third, boys and girls see that the older forms of faith 


14 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


have had no particular effect, on the whole, upon their 
elders’ lives, which are clearly as sterile and unbeautiful 
as those of “‘the ungodly.”” The consequence is that their 
parents have had no seeds to give of the sort that will 
_ live in the new soil. Fourth, religion has come to mean, 
for many of these youngsters, little more than blame: 
the virtues of the fathers have been visited on the chil- 
dren. It all suggests to them trouble with the authori- 
ties for neglect of duties and formalities, apparently not 
worth doing for their own sake, and inducing a wholly 
artificial sense of guilt and moral discomfort. Being 
young and free, they have done the obvious thing and 
dropped it all; and that is about as far as they have got. 
As a fifth reason we must not fail to include the dis- 
union, the mutual contradiction and distrust, among 
the churches. 

But the youth of our day want God. They will not 
be satisfied without an intelligible glimpse or hint of 
things as they are. They are not content to take their 
God out of a book, or at second hand from anybody. 
They want to piece together for themselves, out of un- 
canonical sources that they are learning to trust and 
understand, a conception that is their own, and that 
works. No small part of the difficulty lies in the fact 
that they want more God than the current theologies are 
prepared to give. They are perplexed to see God thrust 
off into a corner and the whole of man’s world organized 
apart from him. This departmenting of life, this segre- 
gation of God, seems to them (until they grow used to 
it) as odd as if the same thing were to be done to so 
universal a commodity as the sunlight. They are in 
the dark, these alumni of a Christian nation’s Sunday- 


SUMMARY OF UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION 15 


schools, about the few things that really matter. But 
it is the law of all growing organisms to push in an 
orderly fashion toward light. Light and growth, youth 
and God, these belong by their nature to one another, 
and each is forever restless until the other is found. 


CHAPTER III 


A SYMPOSIUM OF UNDERGRADUATE 
OPINION ON RELIGION 


Use is here made of nearly two hundred themes, 
written by undergraduates in the winter of 1923-1924 
on the subject of religion. These themes were not written 
for publication, but as a basis for classroom discussion. 
Misleading, self-conscious utterances obviously meant 
for the public eye have thus been avoided. 

Many diverse points of view, many church connec- 
tions, are represented in these themes, but there are 
notable agreements, and a fairly definite set in the tide 
of opinion. It has therefore been possible to select cer- 
tain papers as representative of undergraduate religious 
thinking, and to construct with them two composite 
themes, one on religion in general, and the other on the 
church. We may suppose these exhibits to have been 
written by almost any one of the hundreds on any cam- 
pus; a member of the junior class, perhaps; a thought- 
ful, likable fellow; runs the half-mile rather well but 
has not yet made his letter. We shall call him Young 
Smith. Or it might have been his sister, Young Miss 
Smith, for some of the quotations are from themes by 
women students, and I defy any one to tell which they 
are. The quotations have not been artificially colored 
or flavored, or doctored up in any way. Here and there, 
however, slight verbal changes have been made for the 


sake of unity. Quotation-marks have not been used 
16 


UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON RELIGION 17 


except at the beginnings of paragraphs, though each 
paragraph contains quotations from several themes. 

Needless to say, the writer of this book is not to be 
held responsible for what undergraduates have written 
here, except as to his judgment in the choice of what is 
indeed typical undergraduate thinking. The purpose of 
this selection is not to indicate any especially significant 
thought, or to suggest that he necessarily agrees with 
what is said. 


I. YOUNG SMITH ON RELIGION 


“Undergraduates in any university may be thought 
of in three distinct groups with regard to our attitude 
toward religion. The first are for it; the second are dead 
against it; the third are indifferent to it. The majority 
of us are in group three, and do not at present see any 
reason for changing to either the first or second. In the 
first are the natural conformists and the institutionalists, 
who identify religious faith with external moral prac- 
tices; and the young ‘mixer,’ who is a past master at 
planning a missionary campaign, engineering committee 
meetings, and promoting a Bible class. He knows how 
to swing it right. In the second section are the intellec- 
tual radicals, who wave the Bible aside as infantile non- 
sense. Prayer is to them a series of mumbles; and faith, 
through which man rises above his temporal pains, be- 
comes a psychological mind-color, which will some day 
be subject to chemical analysis. They are convinced 
that their lives are controlled both internally and ex- 
ternally by themselves, and not by a supreme Deity. 
Their numbers are few but their words bear real weight 
with new experimenters in culture. 


18 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


“Now we come to the third lot—those who form ma- 
jorities in campus elections, who crowd the campus 
walks, and who make the movie-houses pay. When 
questioned about what they think of religion they can 
never give an intelligent answer, and the sooner the dis- 
cussion is changed to something else the better they 
will be pleased. Church religion is not a live issue with 
them. Arguing about it seems a waste of time. They 
say, ‘Differences in religion have caused trouble the 
world over from the start, and so far as we can see, have 
never settled the question, and never can. Rather than 
converting one another, we should spend our time prac- 
tising the religion we believe, and should let the other 
fellow do the same with his.’ 

‘Everybody likes to argue, that is, to win an argu- 
ment. And religion is so easy to argue about. That is 
one reason why religion gets so much talked about in 
the bull sessions. Some one may start by asking about 
the origin of Christmas, and it may go clear up to the 
throne of God before it is done. The stories in Genesis 
come in for a lot of hammering from the scientists 
present, with indeterminate results. The miracles come 
in for a good share. Or we may find a discussion of the 
various churches, and whether there will be a merger. 
Or whether the fundamentals of the different faiths are 
the same. 

‘“‘Some time ago there was held at our house a bull 
session on religion. It did not start on that subject, but 
soon the question came up: ‘What benefit does religion 
give to mankind?’ As I remember it, the conclusion 
was that it is human nature to look up to something or 
some one. Religion unifies this universal trait by turn- 


UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON RELIGION 19 


ing the thoughts of all to one person, and by playing on 
this weakness to set up a code which is called morals. 
By thus developing standards of conduct, religion has 
advanced civilization. Another point that came up was 
whether non-attendance at church denoted disbelief. It 
was agreed that it did not. Several held that tennis, 
hikes, etc., in the place of church, were not admissible; 
others disagreed, saying that one might do anything on 
the Sabbath and hold God in his heart all the time, and 
these scoffed at the other opinion as being the cause of 
the ‘Blue Laws.’ The argument was dropped after we 
had gone over a question that one of the fellows asked: 
in Revelation 22 : 18 are the words, ‘For I testify unto 
every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of 
this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God 
shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this 
book.’ The question was whether this referred to Reve- 
lation alone, or to the New Testament, or to the whole 
Bible. The discussion of this point was longer than that 
on any of the others, but we came to no definite conclu- 
sion, and the meeting broke up, each maintaining his 
own opinion. We had another session last night. Be- 
longing to a certain church we did not think mattered 
as long as we are all out for the same thing, which is to 
deal with our fellows as we would have them deal with 
us. It is true to a certain extent, we agreed, that you 
must look out for yourself, because if you do not, no- 
body will look out for you. Just how to fit these two 
facts into each other was not made clear. 

“When we came to college we had correct hut hazy 
notions of a heaven for good people, and a hell for bad 
ones, and were satisfied that the race extends back to 


20 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


Adam and his glorified rib, Eve. Then we learned that 
man is evolved from protozoa, and that the Bible is in- 
teresting chiefly as a piece of literature, and we heard 
of the mechanistic theory. Our former notions were 
rudely pushed into the background, and a period of 
stark unbelief began. Having been trapped once, we de- 
cided not to commit ourselves again. And that scepti- 
cism usually lasts through college as the attitude toward 
religion. The usual thing is to doubt everything that 
smells of church. It would be agreed that God is a cre- 
ator, instituting laws of nature that reflect his supreme 
intelligence, but that he is no longer to be thought of as 
concerned with individual men. That Jesus was a good 
man and a great teacher, but that Socrates and Buddha 
were likewise good men and great teachers. One comes 
to regard Man as wholly material, with no possibilities 
of a future life. One remains ethical only because he 
believes good ethics have been found by experience to be 
best for the race, and because one has the habit. Since 
the theology of the day is so open to question one does 
the easy thing and keeps out of it. It is no longer an 
active or controlling factor in one’s life. 

‘Perhaps for the first few nights after our arrival at 
college we went to the Strand. Whenever the picture or 
vaudeville approached the favorite old sentimental topics 
of mother and God, the older students ridiculed the 
scene or acted bored. As time went on we imitated 
them. It became delicious to us to cease fearing God 
and living in awe of all things touching him. So that 
now, as we enter the familiar evening sessions in some 
one’s room, we find that every ninth word of the older 
men is a ‘Jesus Christ,’ or other swear word, and are 


UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON RELIGION a1 . 


not in the least bothered about it, and have ourselves 
enlarged our vocabulary. 

“Tn classes, especially in physics, we seem to have the 
impossible proved to us often. We begin to discard all 
our former credulity and to accept only things that can 
be proved, and to prove logically everything we say. 
We now pick up a Bible with a mind that looks for 
proof. Immediately the creation story in Genesis looks 
absurd, and the miracles with which the pages of the 
New Testament are covered seem to us the inventions 
of the child-like minds of primitive people. And so we 
toss Bibles aside and join as full-fledged members of the 
anti-Christer league. At every turn we find new proof 
that God is absolutely unnecessary. One professor 
proves that the’ creation of the world is entirely due to 
its own physical forces; another experiments with the 
creation of life itself. If man is so omnipotent, why 
bother with a.God? And yet in spite of this—and rather 
illogically—the training of our early years is not easily 
cast aside. There remains a little hope inside of us that 
there may really be some truth in the more attractive 
parts of our old-time creed. I am sure that some of us 
cling to what we can save through loyalty to our par- 
ents and desire to spare them pain. 

“The question what constitutes any one’s religion 
is no longer a simple one. When I speak of religion I do 
not refer to a church creed; one’s religion is not the creed 
of his church, but the belief he himself forms. In the 
effort to find what is true and lasting, an undergraduate 
will adopt any new thought at all. By trial-and-error 
methods he comes to a belief of his own, not perfect, 
not complete, but his own. This belief is his start in 


22 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


making his religion. He tries to lead a fairly good life 
fashioned after a code of ideals which he has set up for 
himself. Few fellows refrain from this or that only be- 
cause it is forbidden in the Ten Commandments. It is 
not on account of being held responsible hereafter that 
we restrain ourselves. 

“Before we graduate most of us come to a time when 
we feel that our courses are not giving us all there is 
to it, and that something important is being missed. 
By then, too, the real struggle with self has begun; and 
because self is so close to God, here begins too our real 
contact with religion. Struggle brings self-judgment, 
and we find a need for a religion that satisfies at a time 
like that, while still satisfying the reason. If it could 
give us a sort of mystical view of God, and at the same 
time help us to realize the full powers of our self, it 
would be the real thing. It would have little to do with 
‘Thou shalt,’ and less to do with ‘Thou shalt not,’ and 
would save its strength for saying in loud tones, ‘Thou 
canst.’”’ 


II. YOUNG SMITH ON THE CHURCH 


“““Why do we have churches?’ is a question often 
heard about the campus, when the fellows happen to 
be on this subject. Why do we pay out thousands, even 
millions, of dollars for church property? We certainly 
do not gain any material profit from the land or build- 
ings, which might be used for business purposes at 
great advantage. Would it not be just as well to pray 
if you want to in your own house, without going to all 
this expense? Why should we feel bound to sit in a 
hot, ugly church, buzzing with flies, and listen to some 


UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON RELIGION 23 


one who, in many cases, is not fit for his job? Just what 
is back of this statement in the Bible saying that we 
must go to church? 

“T often wonder why we do not speak out our minds 
more often on this church question. No one really is 
interested in the sort of thing they get from the pulpit; 
you can see it to watch them. If we are disappointed in 
the churches, why do we continue’ to deceive ourselves 
about it, and talk as if they were still a going concern? 

*‘ An educated man feels that he really must be abit 
cynical about churches. So many people only use them 
as a show place for clothes; and the girls to meet the 
fellows—and vice versa. Speaking for myself, I cannot 
accept the religion of about ninety per cent of church- 
goers. Rather than take that, I would get on without 
any. There seems to be something lacking. Religion 
consists, to those of whom I speak, of going to church 
on Sunday, listening to a sermon on how they should 
live, and perhaps having a slight attack of inner con- 
sciousness that they are not living quite up to par, and 
then passing out of church as out of a bath, and forget- 
ting all about it. 

“T think my own case is typical of most. I was 
brought up in a home where every member of my fam- 
ily attended the —— Church. Until the time I came to 
college I used to go with them as a matter of course. 
For the first couple of weeks here I went to the down- 
town church. From then on I went once in a long while, 
for I had said I would. In the second year I did not go 
at all. Now I usually spend my Sundays doing nothing, 
or catching up on back work, or taking a hike. I sup- 
pose it is because I am too lazy and satisfied with my- 


24. THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


self, but I think the church is to blame too, because I 
can usually get more to think about out of a good 
movie than from the sermon. Religion in the form of 
churchgoing no longer seems necessary, or even helpful. 

“One trouble with our idea of religion is that it is 
made to appear socially compulsory. One is not con- 
sidered a good man unless he is affiliated with a church. 
Consequently most people are members simply because 
it is the proper and respectable thing. Few have any 
real faith in Christ. What they profess and what they 
believe are two different things. So it is possible for 
some to continue in good standing even though they 
only go to elevate themselves in their own eyes and in 
the eyes of their social equals, with the idea of making 
friends of the ‘right sort.’ If Christians were to come 
in for a little persecution now and then, they would fall 
off like blackberries. , 

“T don’t know any one here that thinks it matters 
whether you belong to the Methodists, Catholics, or 
anything else, as long as they have some religion and 
live up to it. I myself do not feel bound to any set 
form of church-membership, though I was brought up 
in the —— Church. When I go to church now, I have 
no particular choice, if only the sermon is not too long. 
Being a Methodist, let us say, just because your par- 
ents were, is like wearing a second-hand hat that does 
not fit, and you do not look well in it. Every man whose 
wits are alive in college is building for himself those 
ideas in religion that will fit him. He feels himself a 
student of religion just as he is a student of any other 
subject. 

“For our failure to go to church we come in for a lot 


UNDERGRADUATE OPINION ON RELIGION 25 


of censure, most of which comes from those who know 
nothing of the conditions of student life. They do not 
realize the freedom into which we are suddenly thrust, 
or the change in reasoning and point of view. The rea- 
sons are obvious. Most of us believe we can be just as 
good Christians as those that do attend. Besides, we 
have no concrete idea of God, and the churches cannot 
supply us with one. We figure that to-morrow will come 
just the same whether we go to church or not. Then 
there is the difficulty due to a change of scene. Often a 
freshman will not go to his church the first Sunday 
because he is hazy as to its location; it is bound to be a 
strange place full of strangers; he has no one to go 
with him and does not want to go alone. His bashful- 
ness is the first element in a train of circumstances that 
grows bigger and bigger. If you feel bashful that first 
Sunday, and stay home to unpack your trunk and hang 
your pictures, the chances are against your ever getting 
the habit in college. You watch to see who else goes, 
and when you count them up and look them over, you 
decide to be damned with the great majority. As the 
months pass and no one takes you up for not going, the 
thing becomes a habit. The week has been long and 
full, and sleep is good on the day of rest. Sometimes, 
that day of consecutive quiet (the only one till next 
Sunday !) is indispensable in getting out long reports. 
At home, church was one of the big, if not the big, so- 
cial events. It was your club. But at college, fraternities 
and the activities fill this need, and more than fill it. 
The church thus has its biggest function cut from under 
it at college. For those who for one reason or another 
do not get into the life of the campus, I suppose that 


26 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


the church plays the same part that it did at home; it 
is their club. Then, as a last reason, look at the church 
as it exists In this workaday world and you will see that 
it is in the hands of people without any special spiritual 
or even intellectual gift. They oppose science, especially 
the theory of evolution. They censor the literature of 
their day till it is to their liking. They oppose what is 
usually the best artistic expression in the theatre. They 
send to damnation the cynic, the sceptic, the agnostic 
—every one who does not see things in just their way. 
Students therefore content themselves with believing 
what they themselves can find out, not what these peo- 
ple tell them to believe. They have found something 
better. They will not accept the dictates of a God who 
speaks only in doggerel hymns and poorer sermons, and 
thunders against ‘the so-called higher critics,’ ‘the im- 
morality of the theatre,’ ‘the profligacy of the younger 
generation.” They would like to hear something about 
a possible heaven, and not so much about a certain 
hell.” 


PART I 


“Tf gold ruste, what shal iren doo?” 
CHAUCER, ‘‘THE CANTERBURY TALES” 


CHAPTER IV 
THE WALLED CITY 


That enchanted city, the Campus, is completely forti- 
fied and moated round against the invasion of the every- 
day world. Birth and death, ‘‘those divine anarchists,” 
seldom enter here. Vastly remote and unreal seem all 
who must work and sweat for bread, and buy and sell, 
on whom the sun shines less benignly. The undergradu- 
ates, its population, are immersed in its ways as fish 
are in the sea. They breathe it, eat and drink it, dream 
of it by night and work for it by day. Every energy is 
called up in its service. There is a unanimity of devo- 
tion to Alma Mater, the Fostering Mother, that suggests 
something mystical, medizval, in its colorful intensity. 

But to-day over those sheltering walls chill winds 
are blowing. About our colleges and universities of the 
twentieth century play forces that, whether they will 
it or not, shall usher in still another all-compelling mass 
movement of the soul of humankind. At their gates we 
may listen to the heave and surge of the tides of the 
world, going one knows not surely whither. 

Now when the cosmic map suffers some radical 
change, or when the destinies of peoples emerge into 
sight of new objectives, man always resorts to the august 
language of religion. Only the highest categories will 
express all that he feels; only in a religious mood, and 
by religious terms, can it all be evaluated. And they 
who deal in ‘“‘futures” have in such times always been 

29 


30 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


looked upon as prophets of the Highest, witnesses to 
the things of God. Once more humanity is at pause in 
the presence of new worlds and new destinies, and we 
look again to our “best minds” for the all-clarifying 
word. Prophets they are; not by any disavowal of theirs 
can they evade it. We see them as possible successors 
to those daring seers in other times whose faith swept 
man out of old worlds into new—the pilgrim fathers 
seeking a city whose foundation is God; Columbus 
faring westward in Christ’s name, and on Christ’s errand; 
Paul in the midst of Mars hill declaring the God who can 
be known. 

We as a people value instruction and information at 
a higher value than any other modern nation. But there 
begins to break upon us a fear that instruction and in- 
formation are not enough, that there is something more 
which has been left out, something ‘‘ generally necessary 
to salvation.”? Can knowledge alone shape our destiny ? 
Are souls reborn in classrooms? Can religion be taught? 

Universities are Alma Mater to more than the 
mind. These who come to their gates are human beings 
ready and capable of taking almost any standard for 
themselves, but with no least idea.of their own which of 
several standards to choose. Inside each one of them, 
inextricably mingled, are tenderness and cruelty, no- 
bility and baseness, great dreams and petty desires, re- 
nunciation and lust, the animal and the divine. A judg- 
ment is upon our universities that they are sending 
students forth uncertain still whether they are merely 
thinking machines, merely possessive animals, or living 
souls capable of the heights, citizens of a kingdom not 
alone of the world that is seen. As a condition of their 


THE WALLED CITY 31 


leading our sons and daughters into a new world, the 
universities of this land must come to a decision regard- 
ing what they mean to make of them. They can no 
longer avoid taking sides in this matter. They can no 
longer put off presenting, with fine emotion, a convinc- 
ing picture of the character of the good man and the 
good nation for our day. They must more definitely aid 
in the rehabilitation of righteousness. They must help 
us answer questions such as these, which are being de- 
bated (in deeds if not words) up and down the land: 
What is Man? What constitutes The Good Life within 
the soul and abroad among one’s fellows? Does civili- 
zation consist in the conjugation of the verb to ge? or 
to give? In our preoccupation with other diverting 
things, we in America have lost a concerted sense of 
direction in spiritual things. We have lost our former 
ardor for right and wrong. Outlines are blurred; the 
road is dark. This nation is in doubt, as between several 
rival gods, which god to worship. We have lost the con- 
viction that there is any such thing as what our fathers 
called ‘‘the One True God.” And since we have no 
longer any God to worship, we have no permanent and 
compelling concept of what Man is meant to be, or 
what sort of a world this really is. And so we do not 
know what knowledge is for. We would have from our 
company of educated men certain liberating words 
which shall reshape our national life and give us back 
our God again. 

The universities have already responded to new de- 
mands upon them, and have long since gone beyond 
their original function of instruction only. They have 
entered the private and social life of their students as 


ae THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


landlord, as caterer, as doctor, as athletic and musical 
director. And all this because the needs of their natural 
growth have fastened these new functions upon them. 
It now seems no less imperative that they appear be- 
fore their students as guides and witnesses to the things 
of God. There are, of course, plenty of reasons for let- 
ting it alone. One is well aware of the long history of 
sectarian control and the bitter fight which these very 
universities have only just ceased to wage for religious 
freedom and comprehensiveness. Indeed, it is the re- 
action from the bitterness of that fight that has with- 
drawn them from active connection with the religious 
function. I do not by any means suggest that univer- 
sities should be under church, or interchurch, control, or 
that they should officially attempt to “win youth back 
to the church,” or that they should issue dicta on the 
Incarnation or whether one must be baptized with 
much water or with little to be a Christian. No. There 
is an inner compulsion here, a logic of facts, which 
places the whole question beyond the range of any par- 
ticular interest or church, and makes it the immediate 
concern of every man and woman of good-will. 

These are the facts to which, we refer: On the one 
hand, our professionalized churches, hopelessly divided, 
immersed in partial and passing orthodoxies, have be- 
come hardly more than standing committees to wait 
upon God with the due formalities. They are no longer 
guides; one cannot be sure that they are reliable even 
as guide-posts. And, on the other hand, Science, un- 
accompanied by an enthusiasm for righteousness, turns _ 
out to be a blind guide, leading back into the ditch. 
We find ourselves at a time when radically new cos- 


THE WALLED CITY 33 


mologies of the mind and soul are being born, and we 
cannot tell whither we shall be led in search of the 
whole truth about ourselves. Our need is not for more 
orthodoxies based on learning and logic, but for faith, 
free and unafraid in the face of new facts—a venture- 
some spirit in a world whose intellectual boundaries have 
suddenly widened in every direction. Man cannot live 
by words alone. We must have a renewal of religious 
insights from any source that can supply them, to set 
our souls, our wills, on fire. Wanted at once: one Prophet, 
one Poet, and one Saint. 

Can the universities teach religion ? 

Certainly they have the equipment (if equipment be 
the prime need, as some think). Wealth, lands, build- 
ings for every purpose, books, scientific instruments, 
trained specialists in every field, the confidence of the 
bulk of the public—everything that money can buy, or 
effort establish, or ingenuity devise, is there. And the 
students are not less well provided. They are notice- 
ably better dressed, shod, housed, and fed than their 
contemporaries in this or any other part of the world. 
(An evening in one or other of their more deeply up- 
holstered fraternity houses makes one hanker after the 
bracing simplicity of that ancient prophet’s chamber— 
“fa bed and a table and a stool and a candle.’”’) They 
sit in scientifically ventilated and heated classrooms. 
The least defect in eyesight is corrected with the proper 
lenses. Text and reference books that scholars of yester- 
day scarcely dreamed of; note-books bound in leather 
and filled with the very best blank paper; self-sharpening 
pencils; fountain-pens ‘“‘tipped with iridium” (fairy 
word that—iridium—such stuff, surely, as dreams are 


34 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


made with!). Is all this external bounty being trans- 
lated into internal plenty? Does there drop from 
those efficient, nimble pens any language, any idea, 
any dream, more profound and more useful to the race 
than those that once flowed, in chilly attics, over 
the points of iron or goose-quill pens?. Do more goods. 
result in more good? That is the major question not 
only for our universities but for the whole land. These 
boys and_girls are hungry for nothing but what they 
have. There is little or no self-imposed austerity. There 
is no indignation or revolt; no daring to spring to the 
defense of lost causes. One observes a willingness to 
work hard enough in harness for marks and credits, but 
along with it goes a distinct uneasiness and distrust in 
the presence of any suggestion of high spiritual enterprise 
involving the imagination. This is the sickness that de- 
stroyeth in the noon day. There is no room for religion 
here. The untoward question keeps forcing itself in: 
Have these young people been given too much? It is the 
question of questions; and the answer is disquieting. 
No one yet sees his way through to the other side. It 
troubles presidents and deans and professors as well as 
unofficial critics; hardly a faculty meeting fails to touch 
one or another of its phases. 

Not only have they too much; there are also too 
many. The universities are being asked to do an im- 
possible thing: to turn out a hand-wrought product with 
machines; to deliver a quality product by quantity 
methods. Machine production, the specialty of our age, 
has penetrated even here. The more obvious results are 
familiar: an almost, universal tyranny of marks and 
credits, wide-spread slaving and parroting for standing 


THE WALLED CITY 35 


with the professor in feverish concern to “get by,” a 
mental lock-step, a standardization of every student’s 
effort and thought and product. Its consequences have 
even invaded the faculty, for in that vast machine, any 
but the most dauntlessly alive of men must perforce be- 
come machines too. One sees it in that unfailing formula 
of an undergraduate at the beginning of an official in- 
terview: “I don’t want to take your time’’; for his pro- 
fessor must receive him during rigid office hours in a 
barren, formal office, seated behind a desk (symbol of 
vast work now being interrupted). What possibility is 
there of anything being transacted here but the ordi- 
nary routine between any machinist and any piece- 
work? This speeding-up is disastrous to the religious 
mood and impulse in so far as it breaks down the sense 
of identity, and cramps the more serene and spacious 
motions under the monstrous dominance of a machine. 
The soul is bound to the wheels and can only go round 
and round and round. 

Perhaps, then, we shall find our medium for the 
teaching of religion in the recognized and established re- 
ligious agencies on the campus. Let us see. The recog-” 
nized religion of any representative university is gen- 
erally that of modern successful America. It worships 
material success, and tacitly admits that man’s true 
nature is to get, not to give. It evidently believes that 
man can be saved by words alone. It is a religion chiefly 
for Sundays and good clothes, and finds expression 
through ‘‘religious exercises,” which keep one fit— 
though it is not specified for what one is kept fit. It 
leaves one conveniently alone between Sundays. It is, 
urbanely sceptical of any but a “white, Protestant, 


36 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


native-born” God. In a university chapel that I know, 
the central figure in a mosaic frieze is that of a tall 
youth in academic robes, seated, gazing into the depths 
of a crystal sphere that he holds in his hand.» Is not 
this-a rather striking symbol. of the university. religion 
of to-day? For the figure is solitary and self-absorbed, 
intent on what the eyes can see and the hands handle; 
he is so very serious-minded, so obviously thinking up 
new crises (one recollects the phrases of the knitted- 
brow school of campus religionists—“‘this weighty mo- 
ment,” “this unprecedented task,” ‘“‘this unparalleled 
opportunity’’). And he is sedentary, inactive; and last 
of all, he is cold to the touch. 

If the universities are ever to grow up to the high 
spiritual demands of these times, they must get a radi- 
cally new conception of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
which, when it is true to itself, sweeps through all shut 
places like a mighty wind. It has never wholly ceased 
turning the world upside down and breaking up the 
crust of old habits and motives and perennially opening 
every closed question. Not for long can it leave us in 
peace, try as we may—and we do try—to escape it. 
Such a faith is fit companion for all who are young of 
heart in this day or any day, catching up their every 
ardor, eagerly scanning new and wider horizons, urging 
each one of them on, with an energy greater than his 
own. What new light might not shine forth from these 
walled cities set upon their hills, if such a Gospel ever 
took possession of them! What new madness might 
not break forth there if youth ever were to take Jesus 
Christ at his word! 

Religion of this sort cannot be taught; it can only be 


THE WALLED CITY 37 


caught. ‘‘The intellect is not a flame, but a wick, and 
must be enkindled.” The function of universities is to 
provide fuel, so that when the fire descends from heaven 
it may neither consume the wick nor be extinguished for 
lack of sustenance, but may give forth light, radiant 
and clear, to guide the feet of many in the way. 


CHAPTER V 


WANTED: A NEW HEAVEN FOR A NEW 
EARTH 


In whatever age it may find itself, and under what- 
ever circumstances, religion will be observed to exer- 
cise two distinct functions. Under one aspect it is a 
road to travel; under the other it is a city to dwell in. 
The former function is ever in process of change, some- 
times orderly and gradual, sometimes with earthquake 
shocks, keeping pace the while with the restless, voy- 
aging mind and soul of man. ‘Truth is without habi- 
tation or name; like the Son of Man, it hath not where 
to lay its head.”’ The mystics, prophets, and reformers, 
the Godward-minded philosophers, scientists, and crit- 
ics, all find their place here, each contemplating the 
Eternal Mystery, each seeking by his own path the 
hidden way of unification. The second function lags 
behind its fellow; there is always somewhat of a gap 
between the two. It would remain stationary but for 
the impulse, sometimes impatient and harsh, from the 
other wing. It perpetuates the stabilities and moralities 
of the group, and guards the deposit of faith. It does 
not criticise things as they are; it simply reveals them 
as means of grace. (Perhaps this is, after all, the ulti- 
mate criticism.) It comes to people with that which 
helps. It is a kindly fold for the harried sheep, and 
keeps them from being utterly roofless in the winter 
wind. In the present chapter we shall confine our atten- 


tion to the first of these two functions as it relates to 
38 


A NEW HEAVEN FOR A NEW EARTH 39 


certain current problems of the mind. Consideration of 
both functions is renewed under another aspect in 
Chapter VIII, on the Church. 

_ Itis a favorite pastime of ours to endue the recent 
college graduate with the aura of his august surround- 
ings, to take it on faith that by virtue of his college 
course he really belongs in the company of educated 
men, and ranks among the best minds. No disappoint- 
ments seem to rid us of this vested illusion. However, 
something certainly does happen at college to a boy’s or 
girl’s mind that should, theoretically if not in fact, 
make that mind a superior sort of instrument. For un- 
dergraduates are daily being trained in classrooms and 
laboratories to discover and recognize facts by scien- 
tific methods, and to judge them by realistic standards. 
They are taught to doubt appearances, to apply tests, to 
suspend judgment until all the facts are in. If the stu- 
dent be alert and responsive, he recognizes himself as 
‘“‘a candidate for truth.” The realism of his intercourse 
with nature, never pretending a knowledge of it that 
he does not himself possess, never endowing it with 
fanciful or poetic attributes;—all this immersion in a 
purely factual and objective world, is doing something 
to the minds of the college youth of our day which, 
while it neglects certain other aspects no less important, 
yet does produce serviceable instruments for the pur- 
suit of facts. 

Some parents fail, I think, to see the implications of 
all this. They are unwilling to take responsibility and 
make allowances for such changes as are the natural 
product of the environment in which they have wittingly 
placed their children. They understand in a general way 


40 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


that college is ‘‘a place of the mind, a time for thinking 
and an opportunity for knowing,’ but they have not 
yet quite got the picture of what is bound to happen 
there. And they wonder why “the modern mind” has 
so completely lost its ardor for the things they care 
for. One often hears, too, the complaint that young 
people show signs of a loss of faith and of a weakening 
apprehension of spiritual things. But it is not so much 
a loss of faith as the discovery that they never really had 
one. It is not a weakening apprehension, but the be- 
ginnings of translation into a new tongue, the spiritual 
meanings of which the youngsters have not yet mastered. 
For six days of the week they breathe the atmosphere 
of the laboratory, their minds moving without external 
hindrance in orderly fashion, where that which is not 
yet known is regarded as the raw material of future 
knowledge. But on the Sunday when they go to church, 
they are likely to meet quite the opposite attitude 
toward truth. There, all is already known. The vital 
facts were ‘‘once delivered”—a deposit of faith to last 
for all time. “All the great mutations are enacted.” 
They find this other world unbelievably different, and 
already alien and unfamiliar. And they go back where 
they feel they belong, and stay there. 

Here then is a task for exponents of religion: to hew 
out new and more daring concepts for the old truths; 
to bring a new Pentecost to pass, where every one shall 
recognize the language of the Spirit for his own. Let 
fearful saints fresh courage take, and reassure them- 
selves that the facts of the soul, while perhaps not so 
evident to the modern perception, are certainly not less 
well evidenced than are physical facts; and that the 


A NEW HEAVEN FOR A NEW EARTH 41 


Spirit, the breath of God, is still creative of that which 
is most worth creating. It is necessary that its defenders 
break away from exceptions and reservations and all 
temporizing, and place religion on grounds that can 
never be taken away from it. While utilizing the au- 
thentic findings of science in the world of physical facts, 
they must insist on the validity of that interpretation 
of those same facts which reveals their ultimate value 
to the soul, and which gives life a meaning and a pur- 
pose and a goal. The head must no longer say to the 
heart, I have no need of thee. If spiritual guides can 
construct a case and a claim for the facts of the soul 
that shall be as clearly worthy of reasonable attention 
as is the claim which is made for physical facts; and if 
they can convince the youthful inquirer that religiously 
apprehended values are not hostile to facts scientifically 
known, they will find him ready to take them as seri- 
ously as they take themselves. 

Under these terms God would be recognized as being 
not a God for Sundays only, or one who is shut up in- 
side of churches, not a God withdrawn from the com- 
mon affairs of life or to be sought in unfamiliar ways. 
They would come upon him at every turn. Students of 
chemistry would learn to see him at work in their test- 
tubes in orderly fashion rearranging the elements of his 
universe under their very hands. Engineering students 
would reach out and touch him when they caused iron 
and rock and waterfalls to work for them. Agricultural 
students would perceive him in seeds and soils and sea- 
sons. Any one might at any minute catch a glimpse of 
him in fragrant enduring friendships, in sunsets, in 
great books, or in some great suffering or defeat. They 


4.2 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


would worship him in spirit and in truth by learning and 
obeying his laws and thinking his thoughts after him; by 
sharing in the divine work of creation. There would 
then no longer be that contradiction between the men- 
tal and the spiritual habits of a young person’s mind. 
Both elements would concur in demanding of him cer- 
tain ‘“‘fruits of the spirit’: to see both sides of every 
question, to be strict and sincere with oneself, constantly 
to bring theory to the test of action. To think beyond 
race and prejudice and interest. To accept this present 
world as the best we are likely to have until man sets 
his intelligence to making it better. To see beauty in 
the common things of daily use. In short, “‘to be re- 
ligious with the consent of all his faculties,” not with 
the ultimate object of gaining some reward, but with 
the determination to make the will of God prevail. 
When that good day arrives, we can begin to look for 
a new (yet once well-known) thing to happen. For then 
religion, the poor relation, will come bringing gifts to 
her rich sister on the hill—gifts of new import and price- 
less worth, which none other can supply. Gifts of true 
originality, without which learning is a taskmaster; of 
insight, without which information is blind. In the uni- 
versities we may then look for the passing of all that 
slavery to marks and standing, of that distracted life 
governed by good form, of that willingness to live at 
second hand and to seek knowledge for personal gain. 
That eventful day will witness another result: noth- 
ing less than a renewal of confidence and mutuality be- 
tween theology and the other sciences, such a shifting 
of scenes as shall change the whole intellectual outlook 
of our times. Minor and distracting disputes then being 


A NEW HEAVEN FOR A NEW EARTH 43 


put aside, the true alignment will emerge. The issue 
will be seen to lie between those who conceive the uni- 
verse to be of a sort whose ultimate values can be dis- 
cerned and reckoned by mechanical devices and labora- 
tory methods—and those who are convinced that a 
strictly mechanistic account will always be inadequate, 
and therefore false, and that there is more there than 
can be thus described. The former we shall designate 
as the machine-minded, and the latter as the Godward- 
minded. | 

To the machine-minded, God is an unnecessary hy- 
pothesis. Underneath are the everlasting wheels. They 
say in effect: “Here you have it; ¢izs works, this precise, 
unalterable gearing of wheels into wheels which we have 
discovered. Nothing else is needed for a complete the- 
ory.” It is evident to an unbiassed view that these are 
in the somewhat precarious position of worshipping 
their own minds. It is evident too that machine-minded- 
ness is to be discovered both inside and outside the 
churches. It is natural that they should invade the in- 
most recesses of the soul and dissect it out of its proper 
environment, and handle its shrinking tissues by methods 
better suited to the laboratory study of bacteria. They 
know accurately the anatomy of the tear-glands and 
tear-ducts, but cannot comprehend Jesus weeping over 
Jerusalem. They have no hymns. True, they have 
opened a new physical world before our eyes, and 
powers undreamed for the human mind to use. One 
would not seem to minimize the profound services they 
render to the material well-being of the race. But mate- 
rialist dogmatism has built up its orthodoxies about its 
own revered names and phrases and a new intolerance 


44. THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


is here, not to be hidden under brilliant programmes 
and brilliant results. They have laid the axe to every 
remotest covert on the hills of the hidden self; those 
denuded slopes no longer give water to the valleys. The 
higher springs of human action are visibly drying up. 
All wild things in that pleasant hinterland have fled 
before them into the deeper fastnesses; the hides of the 
victims are nailed up to dry in the sun. But, like all 
aliens, their day is short. At their going the little furry 
beasts and the bright wings of birds and the high- 
antlered deer will return again, along with the per- 
sistent trees. 

Their opponents, whom we have termed the Godward- 
minded, insist that the x in the equation can best be 
resolved by the term God. These too can be found both 
inside and outside the churches. To them all true sci- 
ence is theology, and all true theology is science. They 
have therefore no haunting fear of the material, of which 
religious people are often justly accused; they enter 
gladly upon all this entanglement with the material 
which is life, and find it good. They, no less than the 
others, are explorers of the hidden places of the soul. 
But these latter are come to build a home there in the 
highlands, to grow crops bearing seed after their kind, 
close beside the stream of life, very near its Source. 
And they drink of the living waters higher up than the 
others have yet explored. 

The world and all that is in it belongs to one or Other 
of these rival claimants. The former have given us a 
new and vastly wider material home, full of wonders, 
for our bodies and. minds to dwell in. Can the latter 
clothe it with beauty and radiance that shall speak a 


A NEW HEAVEN FOR A NEW EARTH 45 


language for the soul’s comfort? Can the God-seekers, 
the saints and prophets and poets and wise men, raise 
our eyes to a new and equally enthralling heaven that 
shall enfranchise the soul of man, invaded and van- 
quished? Can they show us the Holy City, perpetually 
coming down to dwell among men, like a bride adorned 
for her husband; a heaven not for dead people, but for 
people who are intensely and increasingly alive; a heaven 
that shall recreate the gift of reverence and wonder for 
our sons and daughters once again, and keep them from 
ever growing old? 


CHAPTER VI 
THE DIVIDED SELF 


This chapter is not a treatise on experimental psy- 
chology. It is rather a very practical attempt to bring 
into discussion certain facts that our religious contem- 
poraries frequently ignore. As we noted in Chapter IV, 
an undergraduate’s care-free exterior does not neces- 
sarily indicate a serene inner man. Parents, ministers, 
and others are often, and quite naturally, deceived into 
thinking that all is well, except perhaps for a few intel- 
lectual doubts. But the fact is that in the most unex- 
pected cases, and masquerading under the most diverse 
dress, one continually finds an inner conflict, “‘two deadly 
hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal,’* waging 
almost unremitting war for possession of the soul. 

Here are portions of four letters to the author, written 
by undergraduates within the past few years: 


“The term is over. ... I feel a sort of cheer- 
less pity for myself and my ideals; they are all gone. 
This is my regular summer mood. I find it impos- 
sible to carry out decisions made beside the fire in 
the long winter months. I am an animal, not a 
brain or a soul. And the trouble is that I go through 
just this reversal of values every year, so that I 
begin to lose confidence in my own deliberate judg- 
ment, and in all abstractions and principles of any 


* William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1914 edition) , 
p. 171. (Longmans, Green & Co. By permission.) 


46 


THE DIVIDED SELF 47 


sort. I want to live just from day to day, following 
each desire as it comes. I know theoretically, of 
course, that the better forces of the universe are 
permanent; I simply drop out of touch with them. 
. . . Self will not bear the responsibility of keeping 
in touch. The philosophy of putting faith in one’s 
self is wholly false and hopeless, I suppose, but I 
can’t carry my faith across to the outside spiritual 
God, or feel that doing so could make any par- 
ticular difference. I don’t know how to get into 
touch with God in the sense of feeling that he is my 
stronghold.” 


“What is the matter with me? Is my experience 
different from other people’s? I am learning with 
some success to handle iron and electricity, and can 
create new combinations of matter by chemical 
formule, but I can’t control or change myself. And 
there is nothing in my college courses to tell me how. 
I am lawless, and the slave of desires whenever they 
choose to come.” 


*“T want to follow Christ but I don’t know how. 
The trees and birds and animals seem more in har- 
mony with God than I; and I feel that God despises 
me for my failure to find him.” 


“T seem to be at war with myself. Two forces 
fight for possession of me. Sometimes I take sides with 
one, sometimes with the other. More often I merely 
look on. Of all things I want peace within, in which 


48 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


to go ahead with my work. But all this struggle 
takes too much energy. How can I prolong the in- 
tervals of peace?” 


These moving words rise from the lips of combatants 
fresh from the field of their inward conflict, with their 
wounds open. I believe they mark the common experi- 
ence in youth; indeed, with a shift in emphasis, all 
through life. Old lusts, fierce hot animosities, fears, 
greed for possession—all the ancestral voices call to us 
out of the animal past. The old tracks through the 
brain, worn by the steps of a thousand generations of 
ancestors, still tempt our feet after theirs. But ever in 
our ears, now louder and now fainter, sound the distant 
silver trumpets of the Holy City beyond the hills, the 
home of our spirit, whither we are bound. Thus we are 
continually pulled in diverse directions. Between them 
we cannot have peace. The tree of the knowledge of 
good and evil has borne its pungent fruit. Try as we 
may we cannot return to the old animal peace that once 
we knew. We have seen too much: we have seen with 
the eyes of God. 


“Down what wild current of my blood 
Comes this desire of Perfectness, 
Which plants cold hunger in my mood, 
And an unreasoned dark distress?” 


Each one of us is actually a battle-field, across which 
to and fro surges a conflict more bitter than any of 
those recorded in the histories. All the waste and the 
bitterness and confusion are there, all the hurt and 


THE DIVIDED SELF 49 


pain. Two wills, two desires, both seek to dominate us. 
They refuse to come to terms. We are like a country 
drained of its man-power and resources by civil war. 
How to conquer this enemy that dogs our footsteps and 
catches us unawares and throws us down and rends us, 
how to make him serve our ends, that is our pressing 
question. All we ask is that “some thaw, some release 
may take place, some bolt be shot back,” so that we 
may go about our tasks with all our effort given to the 
thing in hand without so much waste and distraction 
and contradiction. Something keeps telling us that this 
inward peace is the only possession worth fighting for. 
We shall not be content till it is found. And we would 
have it during youth; not when the warring country is 
exhausted and prostrate. Too late then: we could not 
use it. What we want is a victory in the field; honor- 
ably, not by default. Now, while it is yet the day. 
“How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined 
optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in 
presence of a need of help like this! . . . No prophet 
can claim to bring a final message unless he says things 
that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims 
such as these. But the deliverance must come in as 
strong a form as the complaint, if it is to take ef- 
fect. . . .”* No cheery dismissal, no slap on the back, 
nor yet any ready-made prayer of the usual sort, will 
do. The diagnosis must take account of all the facts. 
For the patient is convinced that a personal blame 
attaches to him along with the disease. Not only is he 
on his back and helpless and alone; he is also covered 
with mud. Not only is he sick; he feels himself at fault. 


* William James, Varieties, p. 162. 


50° THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


For all the while he knows deep in his heart that another 
Heart is wounded by the bitter swift arrow of his denial. 
Sin is the name by which Christians have always 
known this denial of the ideal self; a word whose rate 
of exchange is at present very much below par (by un- 
wise inflation on the part of earlier manipulators, one 
may guess). We cannot on that account ignore it. 

Here then is another wide and fruitful field in pas- 
toral care for those who deal with the religion of young 
men and women. Here, if anywhere, there is need for 
the sure touch of understanding and sympathy. Tech- 
nic is needed, of course, but more than technic one 
needs the gift of understanding and patience—indeed, 
something of the insight and comradeship of the Great 
Physician himself. There was that about Jesus which 
made people, particularly timid and sinful people, know 
that if they but touched the hem of his garment they 
would be made whole. 

Certain practical attempts already being made in be- 
half of undergraduates to bring ‘“‘personal religion”’ into 
_the foreground should be noticed here. They are of two 
sorts. One of them emphasizes the beauty of holiness, 
shows the wonder and beauty of the natural instincts, 
reminds of the joys and responsibilities of maturity 
which await one after the storm and stress of adolescence, 
and paints an appealing picture of the advantages of 
a stainless youth. The writer has seen large audiences 
of young men and women deeply touched and evidently 
helped by this type of approach, especially when it was 
done by a mature and saintly man. Yes, it does great 
good, but it leaves more undone. It is too sky-blue; 
it makes it all seem too easy; it seems to ignore all the 


THE DIVIDED SELF 51 


sting and drive and dirt, and the fact of persistent fail- 
ure of the best intentions. It even increases the load 
for some, by reminding them of what they are missing 
without giving them the means of attaining it. And it 
is too impersonal; it lets the individual escape without 
any overt and personal act of will, just when he was 
perhaps ready to make that act of will, were it required 
of him. One loves this method for its candor andsym- 
pathy and beauty, but it leaves the worst of the casual- 
ties still lying on the field. 

Of profoundly opposite type is another movement, 
the outstanding features of which are its elimination of 
argument as a means of grace, its strong group con- 
sciousness, its emphasis on moral rather than intellec- 
tual difficulties, and its awareness of the soul’s direct 
guidance by the Holy Spirit (referred to as ‘“‘hunches”’). 
Its central purpose is the radical conversion of indi- 
vidual lives by relentless facing of them with the con- 
crete facts of sin, and the need for repentance, confes- 
sion, change of will, and the formation of new habits. 
Three definite steps are prescribed for the penitent: 
first, exteriorization of sin by acknowledgment of it to 
some trusted friend or sympathetic group; second, 
strengthening of determination by immediately ‘‘tack- 
ling” one’s friends and seeking to bring them through 
to a like experience; and third, deepening of the founda- 
tions by unfailing practice of prayer, intercession, and 
watchful meditation. A strongly evangelical theology 
colors its technic. 

We shall not attempt to judge as between the two 
methods; their divergences are deep as human nature 
itself. The former has a future in the universities on 


52 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


condition that it takes off its coat and rolls up its sleeves 
and comes to grips with individuals; that it is willing 
to touch dirt and can remove it; that it makes explicit 
what it now leaves implicit. Prophecy concerning the 
latter is more difficult; the case is more complex. Its 
strength lies in its cutting edge, its surgeon’s method, 
which in skilful hands does often succeed in penetrating 
where the diseased tissues are, and in removing them. 
But this very fact makes it a highly dangerous method, 
and one involving the possible defeat of its own ends. 
Its future would seem conditional, first, on its not tying 
up with any single and narrow theological position; 
second, on its surviving the inevitable mistakes of over- 
zealous and immature adherents; third, on its not at- 
tempting to hold or organize its converts permanently. 
For at best it can touch a young man only during a 
brief moment in his moral career. Its function is there- 
fore, like John the Baptist, simply to awaken an inner 
impulse. Some concise, prophetic application of that 
impulse to the actual business of living, added while the 
occasion lasts, would seem to complete its task. After 
that the soul must fare forth on its own. And a fourth 
condition is that it can work out a truly scientific and 
truly catholic attitude toward the facts of the moral life 
and its pathology. 

It is not our purpose to offer a third method of ap- 
proach to this whole question of the divided self. What 
follows may be of guidance to persons here or there who 
feel it their duty to enter upon this sort of ministry. 

> Four suggestions are made, having to do with elements 
which are noticeably absent from most ministries to 
college students, and which need to be placed at the 


THE DIVIDED SELF 53 


centre again. First, the patient’s whole attention must 
be imaginatively concentrated on what he really wants 
to have happen, as well as on what ails him. Second, there 
should be, at some time early in the process, objective 
confession of the fault with appropriate penance. Third, 
that electrolysis of the soul which we call conversion 
should be brought to pass. Fourth, the convert must be 
identified with an absorbing and morally consistent task. 
These four points are briefly discussed in the following 
paragraphs. 

(1) When a patient comes with his troubles heavy 
upon him, the good soul-surgeon will not be shocked at 
what he hears. He will get at all the facts, relentlessly 
and impersonally. Nor will he be so credulous as to 
accept the patient’s own diagnosis as altogether the 
correct one, for, like the man in the gospel, the lad is 
“willing to justify himself.” All of us, even the very 
elect, are egoists, sensualists, cowards—usually all 
three; and these will pose as something else, something 
more respectable, and must be stripped of their dis- 
guises. Above all, he will not scold. The whole psy- 
chology of blame is out of place here. This young man 
must be considered now not as a culprit but as a cas- 
ualty; a lost soul, if you will, but lost only in the sense 
that he has missed the road: 


~ 
“Nor guessed the traps life gets you in, 
So much more puzzling than mere sin;”’ 


as Mr. Christopher Morley so aptly puts it. The pa- 
tient needs no scolding; he already knows he is pretty 
bad; very likely he is under the common impression that 
to the pure all things are rotten. His adviser’s duty 


54 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


is to get outside himself and (so to speak) inside the 
other’s skin, and see it all through his eyes, if in turn the 
patient is to see it through his adviser’s eyes. Initial 
success in getting the interest and imagination, as well 
as the will, of the patient focussed and aroused to the 
needs of the case, and in convincing him that God’s 
forgiveness and his own eventual restoration are not 
beyond reach, thus making it clear that one is converted 
not only from something but to something—are the 
conditions of further progress. 

(2) Confession of sin to another person has been re- 
garded by Protestants for over four centuries as spiritu- 
ally debasing and profitless. This has become a preju- 
dice, and is not usually subject to debate. The question 
must be reopened for discussion. For the facts go to” 
show, and the new psychology experimentally authenti- 
cates the reality of those facts, that ‘‘exteriorization”’ 
of the conflict is the way to resolve it, and that the best 
method of exteriorization is by confession, which faces 
men and women with the grim fact, and makes them 
hate it vividly and objectively. 

If this particular form of the ‘‘ hygiene of the imagina- 
tion” is to take its due place in’ the ministry to college 
youth, it must be safeguarded in two particulars: First, 
the “‘confessor”’ must be of the right sort. Not every one 
can do it; it requires a particularly high grade of mental 
and spiritual energy and understanding, a genius anal- 
ogous in many respects with that of the better sort of 
physician. Along with this goes the requirement that 
the confessor’s own life shall have passed through some 
similar self-facing and God-facing, and reached at least 
the beginning of unification thereby. Second, the con- 


THE DIVIDED SELF 58 


fessor must know men and women. His instinct for char- 
acter must be so keen that in each case he can silently 
anticipate to himself the gist of what is coming. He 
must see the particular conflict involved and get all the 
facts out into the open, and apply the treatment proper 
to that person’s need and that particular moment in his 
life. Incidentally, he should be able to detect whether 
this self-facing has been left too long, and what the 
effects are of the neglect. And finally, he must gauge 
the moral intensity and capacity of each individual, lest 
when penance is imposed the penitent find himself up 
against such high demands as would be intolerable and 
impossible. All this is no easy task. No man may dare 
to say he is sufficient for it. The only conceivable reason 
for undertaking it is that it must be done. 

(3) Conversion too is readily misunderstood, and is 
capable of being abused when artificially sought. And 
yet it is essential to the soul’s progress. Conversion 
might be described as a spiritual loop-the-loop, the now 
familiar stunt by means of which the pursued plane 
suddenly becomes the pursuer, and in a deadly position 
to harass the enemy plane’s rear. A radical change in 
mood follows the change of position, for with the re- 
sumption of the offensive, and as one’s guns begin to 
bear, the former confidence returns, and with it better 
judgment and control. Victory is in effect already won. 

Conversion is hard to describe except in terms of ac- 
tual experience. Two documents are offered in illustra- 
tion. One is from a young man’s letter, written in 1923: 


“.. . But I was wrong with Christ, wrong with 
myself, wrong with others. Three sins stared me in 


56 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


the face; and they must go. I saw for the first time 
in my life the issue of complete surrender to the will 
of God. ... It meant the disruption of easy, self- 
made plans. I was afraid, yet I dared not turn back. 
Kneeling beside my desk, I gave my whole self to 
God once and for all in conscious and deliberate sur- 
render. I felt no emotion with the decision; I was 
aware of being able to pray easily and honestly for 
the first time in many months, that was all... . 
The old life is gone. A new life opens on limitless 
horizons.” 


The other is equally authentic, and no less accurately 
reported: 


“Tt was after one of our wild parties. I was sitting 
on the side of my bed taking my shoes off. I don’t 
know why, but I was suddenly filled with disgust at 
the whole business, and I said, ‘To hell with all that.’ 
I don’t claim to have grown wings since then, but my 
idea of a good time has changed.” 


(4) Any conversion, even earnestly and whole-heart- 
edly entered upon, must add intelligence to its emotional 
impulse, so that not just control of self, but control of 
events, control of growth, may follow. The actual re- 
forming of will and character must be skilfully plotted 
out by intelligence and foresight, “‘so that Brother Body 
may not be able to murmur against him,” as Saint Fran- 
cis handily says. Just here is where the healing ministry 
will come to its hardest testing. Can such a ministry 


THE DIVIDED SELF 57 


furnish that sane practicality that shall give a young 
man, fresh from his invigorating experience, a series of 
steps, a technic, by which to translate his new impetus 
into daily and hourly habits? Here the adviser has 
to use self-restraint, for his patient will instinctively 
look to him for decisions which shall shape those habits. 
This he must not permit. For the worst habit of all 
is that willingness to live at second-hand which results 
from too great reliance on the expert’s judgment. When 
it invades the moral life it is more than a blemish; it 
is a disaster, for it makes impossible the very thing 
sought—spiritual maturity. A second difficulty lies in 
that disillusioned despair which often comes when the 
beginner finds that his battles are not altogether won. 
It is hard for him to distinguish between defeats and 
defeat. He must learn that one cannot “make the 
world safe” for anything; that each new-born habit 
must struggle for existence and will survive only if 
it can. Patients in these cases of conscience should not 
be encouraged to think that “the power of Christ” 
will waft them along on the strength of a past ex- 
perience and vision. Christ himself definitely refused 
to do this for his disciples, and made it sufficiently clear 
that merely to be with him was not enough. ‘Greater 
things than these shall ye do.” Therefore, this episode 
in the pilgrim’s progress toward unification involves as- 
tuteness and patience and courage on the part of his 
adviser. Allegiance must be won to some new and ab- 
sorbing task. Here one must combine the prophet’s 
with the physician’s part, and speak forth in the name 
of some mighty cause to which one’s whole faith is 
given. This identification with the tasks and problems 


58 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


of his people, in the sharing of which a young man con- 
solidates the newly won position, is the subject of the 
following chapter. 


We must not leave this subject without direct refer- 
ence to the place which the treatment of sex bears in 
such a ministry. A significant fact is revealed by trust- 
worthy records, that one-half of those students who are 
“busted out”? or who leave without finishing the course 
do so because of defects of character. What those defects 
are is not stated in detail; nor is any indication given 
what proportion relate to sins of the flesh. How many 
of the names on that long casualty list stand against 
the account of their parents and the churches, who for 
‘“‘nasty little self-conscious reasons” have shrouded this 
subject in silence? Mostly where sex is touched at all 
from the religious angle, the effort is wasted because of 
superficial or sentimental or furtive handling. As a re- 
sult, the vast majority of undergraduates, men or women, 
do not think of sex as a phase of religion. In almost none 
of the undergraduate themes on religion is any refer- 
ence made to matters of personal morality, none at all 
to sex. Natural reticence would not account for this if 
sex were normally considered as within the accepted 
area of religious discussion. 

The reader will do well, then, to reconsider in the 
light of the facts presented in this chapter (and which 
are everywhere accessible to any one who looks for 
them) the whole restless question of the religious uses 
of “that soiled robe,” the flesh. In this day of con- 
flicting counsels we must speak forth a clear word 
against the too-presumptuous claims of the body. The 


THE DIVIDED SELF 59 


course we must steer is more than ever difficult: on 
the one hand we must no longer tacitly acquiesce in 
that plausible gospel of the body which gratifies, in- 
deed anticipates, its every demand; and equally we must 
resist the obvious temptation to “bid biology recant,” 
that is, the temptation to embrace a stricter puritanism 
resting on a fundamental denial of the body; for if we 
fail to reckon with those obscure inner necessities which 
persist out of our animal past, we do so at our peril. 
That most modern man, Saint Francis of Assisi, has left 
us his refreshing phrase, “‘our Brother the Body.” And 
that simple wisdom is inherent in, and inseparable from, 
the Gospel. The Word became flesh and dwelt among 
us to make it indisputably clear that “this body which 
does me grievous hurt” is fit also for the very highest 
uses—as the very medium, indeed, by which God 
dwells among us and we behold his glory, full of grace 
and truth. 


CHAPTER VII 
MUSTARD-GAS OR MUSTARD-SEED 


What is the function of a university in a modern na- 
tion? If it is merely to equip youth to earn a comfort- 
able living by a better use of their brains, and to train 
them, by exposure to certain ‘‘cultural” influences, to 
be thoroughly at home in their own age, then the task 
is being excellently done. But is an education in com- 
pliance, good form, and the method and habit of suc- 
cess, enough? There is a far more important element— 
the development of a critical faculty and the gift of seeing 
oneself and one’s people objectively, the habit of dis- 
interested discussion, the love of truth for its own sake, 
and the ability to reach independent decisions, even 
though unprofitable and unpopular, with courage to 
bring those judgments to bear on events and affairs. 
These are the qualities of any leadership worthy the 
name. And a university’s chief duty to the nation is to 
engender in its sons and daughters this true originality. 

But the young men and women in our universities 
are impregnably complacent. They have no sense of 
sin for the ills of society.* There is no indignation or 
defiance. For all but a very few, life is as pleasant as 

*Tt should be observed that there are notable exceptions; that there 
is a willingness among at least a small group on every campus to bring 
these questions into discussion. Whether or not the seeds sown at the 
Student Volunteer Convention at Indianapolis, in December, 1923, will 
permanently flourish still remains to be seen. For an account of that 


dynamic gathering, see its Report, Christian Students and World Prob- 
lems, published by the Student Volunteer Movement, New York, 1924. 


60 


MUSTARD-GAS OR MUSTARD-SEED 61 


a sheltered and prosperous home can make it. They have 
simply nothing to get hot about, and rather despise 
those who believe they have. If they hear of some bit- 
ter strike that shakes the world outside, it bears no 
news to them that the very fabric of our sort of civiliza- 
tion is in question and under fire. For four years they 
keep their tender noses to the grindstone, but their 
sense of smell is none the sharper. In classes they recite 
their daily assignments, dutifully learned the night be- 
fore, and go into a panic before every examination; but 
with few exceptions, they see no particular connection 
between classroom economics and ‘‘the restless cause of 
the people.”” This is well enough for under-minds, as 
training in the clerkly virtues; they will work well under 
supervision and for a price. But it does not set the brain 
free for creative social thinking, or develop the faculty 
of independent judgment. “American students are 
strangely docile in mind. Everywhere else in the world 
I find the rising generation in conscious and intense re- 
bellion against the conventions and methods of life and 
thought which dominated their fathers, and which led 
the world to the present disaster. But I found among 
your students little or none of that burning passion to 
discover a new way for mankind, which is the real hope 
of the world to-day. They seem to suffer from some 
strange paralysis of the will. They often seem to lack 
the power to adopt a purpose and then follow it tena- 
ciously and independently. I did not find the normal 
percentage of clear-cut personalities among them.” * 
New minds are needed to comprehend the America 


* Doctor A. Herbert Gray, of the British Student Movement, in a 
letter in The Intercollegian, October, 1923. 


ae 


62 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


which is emerging, a New Fact, out of a half-century of 
industrialism and a decade of war years. They must be 
minds that can think beyond frontiers and coasts, be- 
yond interest and expediency and present interest. 
Most of us see only the America that our particular in- 
terest makes us wish to see. Probably it is impossible 
for any single person to get the whole picture, but two 
facts stand out for any one to see; one, that life under 
the present terms is a hopeless burden for most wage- 
earners, and the other, that war is an inevitable by- 
product of the modern industrial system. Each of these 
two facts feeds on the other, as diseases commonly do. 

Consider for a moment the lot of the wage-earner un- 
‘der industry. Efficiency demands that the workers live 
in cities. And cities, of whose populations the higher 
energies are never demanded, and which effectively ban- 
ish the soil, the trees, friendship, and laughter, the 
privacies of home—indeed almost all the elements 
proper to man—are evolving a strange new type, the 
city-dweller, “‘gazing out upon the universe from a 
crowded street, from over the shoulders or beneath the 
legs of his fellows.” He is the child of his times; the 
Motor-driven Man, driven by a force not his own, but 
which possesses him body and soul. His body has been 
taken from its true environment near the soil, and his 
soul has likewise been suborned from its true function, 
which is to serve God, and must now acknowledge its 
new master, the machine. Thus deprived of its ancient 
sanities, his whole nature protests aloud in weariness 
and frustration. He is geared to a stupefying routine 
which produces goods in which he has no interest or 
concern. He regards his work as a hateful necessity, 


MUSTARD-GAS OR MUSTARD-SEED 63 


and does it perfunctorily and grudgingly, not for ser- 
vice but for money. He is forced to feel an artificial 
poverty in a particularly galling fashion, for even 
though he may draw high wages he must spend them 
all on the barren necessities, poor and ugly though they 
be; and at the same time he sees about him the insolent 
display of vast wealth. He is a man without hope, for 
even though a free citizen in a rich and dominant na- 
tion, he knows himself to be fast bound in misery and 
iron. When the ‘‘vast ledgers of the Eternal” are bal- 
anced, the account will show that much is owed him. 

The other fact must be faced no less relentlessly. For 
if an industrial nation faces a succession of world wars 
as the price of its admission to the wealth of the world, 
there is only one conclusion. It cannot survive. It is 
indeed bitter reading if the future history of industry 
contains no escape from that ever-recurring sequence— 
war, post-war, pre-war, war—the fruits of each episode 
becoming the seeds of the next. Yet what else may we 
look for, on the present basis? ‘‘That motive” (7. e., 
the acquisitive) ‘‘produces industrial warfare not as a 
regrettable incident but as an inevitable result. It pro- 
duces industrial war, because its teaching is that each 
individual or group has a right to what it can get.” * 
And, “‘the external shock of nations in military war is 
only the last and external phase of the internal form of 
the economic and social war.” 

The peoples of the West have not yet worked out an- 
swers to these questions inherent in their present way 
of life. We have assumed that our capacity would keep 


*R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (Harcourt, Brace & Co.), p. 40. 
} Benjamin Kidd, The Science of Power (Putnams), p. 95. 


64 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


pace with our inventions, and have taken it for granted 
that if we could invent a machine we could also control 
it. But this is not the case. Somewhere a vital element 
has been left out, with (as has just been indicated) two 
major consequences—the impoverishment of the human 
stock, and the risk of the loss by war of the very values 
which have been sought. Our keenest and freshest 
thinking, our most fearless criticism even of the suc- 
cessful and strong, must set themselves to work. We 
must have from the universities an unending stream of 
men and women, irained to think in terms of more than 
one civilization, so that they can view their own imper- 
sonally and critically. They must be still young enough 
in spirit to be hopeful of a better world, and to set about 
making it. When alumni gatherings become purposeful 
and disinterested groups of such minds, freely discussing 
(instead of the usual line of golf, drinks, football, and 
money) the ultimate objectives for this nation and the 
next steps to attain them, then intelligence will have its 
chance to become the guide of great affairs, rather than 
blind change on the one hand, and blind opposition to 
change on the other. 

But the strong man armed still keepeth his palace. 
He perceives that there is little chance of any intelligent 
criticism arising that he need take seriously. For, he 
argues, are not the interests of the intelligent and edu- 
cated bound up with his? There will be scattered talk, 
but what are words against armorplate? He is safe 
enough until the protest comes in the form of a gospel 
which will look beyond interest and expediency, and 
announce its cause as the Will of God. Then indeed the 
foot of a stronger than he will be abroad in the land. 


MUSTARD-GAS OR MUSTARD-SEED 65 


The Gospel of Jesus Christ began as a criticism of the 
kingdoms of this world in the name of the Kingdom of 
God. Its sociology is, seek ye first God’s Kingdom as 
the Good, and sufficient goods will not be lacking unto 
you. It is not interested in new schemes or legislation; 
no popular free-all or mend-all gets its vote. That which 
the Gospel has to say goes deeper. It asserts that the 
daily business of life cannot be performed apart from 
God; it is as sacred in its way as praying and churchgoing 
are in theirs. ‘Heaven and hell wait by every doorstep.” 
Through the things of every day—the things that go on 
in factories and offices and homes and streets—God the 
Holy Spirit creates hourly occasions for every one of the 
virtues and every one of the vices. By means of these 
common things of daily use he penetrates into every 
heart; and by them prepares the way for the coming of 
the ultimate civilization, the Commonwealth of God. 

By the standards of that Commonwealth, war for 
material prizes, whether between classes or between na- 
tions, is nothing else than sin. The Christian Gospel is 
not content with denunciations of war, for war is of 
course only a symptom, a result. The Gospel deals with 
motives. Just as Jesus said that adultery is in the wish, 
and murder in the angry heart; so war is already waged, 
though not on paper yet, in the collective insanities 
which possess a people. Back into the recesses of souls, 
back into the way of life which breeds hatred, Chris- 
tianity carries its war to end war. 

It is this that constitutes the claim of Christ’s Gospel 
upon a nation’s serious attention in days like these—as 
a rival claimant, as a civilization demanding loyalties 
not to be reconciled with those of our present way of 


66 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


life. It stands among us as a rebel, saying No in the 
name of a higher Yes, refusing to participate in ways 
that it believes lead to destruction, and offering another 
way, which, though not a little steep and rocky, promises 
to lead to open and fruitful country. 

The function of universities in the modern state is to 
give our rudderless world a creative intelligence, in- 
formed and alert and indignant, selfless and unafraid. 
It is the function of the Gospel to fire that intelligence 
with a passion for righteousness and a divine discontent. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE CITY OF GOD 


They went astray in the wilderness out of the way, and 
found no city to’ dwell in. 

Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. 

So they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he de- 
livered them from their distress. 

He led them forth by the right way, that they might go 
to the City where they dwelt. 


PSALM 107. 

Our mother the Church has need to-day of all her 
children. Although to the world’s way of thinking she 
is never in the right of it, although set aside as out of 
date and useless, though bewildered and apprehensive, 
immersed in musings on a better day that is gone, open 
to attack from every angle—none the less she is still 
our mother, and therefore still rightly claims our love 
and our defense. The time may come again when 
within her borders men and women will find “that 
strength and support, that sense of anchorage, of being 
at home, of having something like themselves to cling 
to.” * She may yet again offer to a self-confident and 
knowing age certain hints and guidance to the goal of 
all living. 

Let us pass in review, briefly, what it is that young 
men and women in college say against the Church. Let 
us get it all out where we can see it. Interpreted freely, 
it runs something like this: 

* J. Neville Figgis, The Gospel and Human Needs (sixth edition), p. 74. 


(Longmans, London. By permission.) 
67 


68 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


First, that the Church impotently exhibits still the 
prejudices and passions of a bygone age—bishopisms 
versus no-bishopisms, dogged orthodoxy versus dogged 
orthodoxy. That reliarce is placed on the saving virtue 
of certain sacred words which “‘induce the anesthesia of 
inborn, inherited certainty.” That it worships its re- 
ligion instead of its God. 

Second, that having nothing in particular to say, it 
disguises its vacuity of purpose behind a formidable, 
highly-organized round of “‘activities,”’ to the financing 
of which all its energies are bent, so that its God be- 
comes a financier, a Grand Treasurer, with a keen eye 
on the collection-plate. Meanwhile there is hunger in 
the souls of men and women who must live. We have 
enough of the bread alone; now give us the Word! 

Third, that its message is refined and abstracted in 
the interests of ‘‘the prevailing intellections”’ till it has 
no meaning or power for the simple and the poor and 
the busy and the sinful. That the mills of God grind 
exceeding fine, so fine that all the nutriment is sifted 
out, and all that is left is thin and wordy argument, un- 
assailable perhaps, but about as nourishing as the east 
wind. Let him that is athirst come, and I will give him 
to drink of the symbol H.O. And so, while expounding 
Christ as God it no longer exhibits Jesus as the Way of 
life. He who once turned the world upside down is 
now become ‘‘one sweetly solemn thought,” upsetting 
to nobody. 

Fourth, that the kingdom which is not of this world 
has been permitted to surrender to the kingdoms which 
are. That the Church’s-whip is of very small cords in- 
deed; that the needle’s eye has accommodatingly been 


THE CITY OF GOD 69 


enlarged; that for the sake of comfort and popularity 
and success an unholy silence is kept in the very pres- 
ence of the wounds of God’s poor, inflicted by the 
strong in their strength. That by this surrender it en- 
thrones self in the place of God, and in effect amends the 
first Commandment: Howbeit, if a majority of persons 
of repute and substance so desire, then it shall be per- 
mitted to have one other God besides me. 

And last of all, this, that the Church has seemed too 
knowing, too facile and assured, in explaining the Eternal 
Mystery, neatly proving everything by the proper argu- 
ments, and seeming to make “the administration of the 
world as simple and judicial as a police-court.” 

So reads the heavy charge against the Church in our 
day. Church people, and especially their leaders, are 
not unaware of these things; one hears no arrogant dis- 
claimers; there is everywhere among them “a certain 
contrite open-mindedness,” and an earnest willingness 
to place the Church again in its proper position as spiri- 
tual leader. But the way is not clear. The soul of man 
is astray in the wilderness out of the way, and finds no 
city to dwell in. 

One is tempted to drop the whole business and begin 
all over again. And yet with what irreplaceable loss if 
we did! What awaits the constructive energy of all 
persons of good-will is the regeneration of the Church 
from within, till it again becomes a sacred precinct 
where the naked spirit of man may be clothed and 
housed against “the cosmic chill of the vast out-of- 
doors of the universe.” 

Those to whose hands that regeneration falls will find 
three things to do. 


70 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


First, they must take a fresh look at their sources and 
tell us in no uncertain terms just what Jesus’ Proposal 
actually is, so that it again becomes good news and a 
way of life to even the simplest of us. They must show 
us Jesus again as his first disciples saw him, and let us 
discover him for what he is. They must be content 
to withhold the question: “‘What think ye of Christ?” 
till he himself has asked each of us, “Whom say you 
that I am?” What do you make of me, out of your 
own experience? The Church must renew its faith 
that Jesus will still bring a man to Christ. We can- 
not accept Christ as God until we have first learned, as 
the disciples did of old, to follow Jesus as Master. Such 
a re-creation of his life must not fail to bring us to the 
heart of that life, where all its forces converge, and 
whence they radiate—that is, to the cross. The ‘‘wis- 
dom of Calvary” would again be made plain for all to 
see: how that in concrete terms, focussed into a few 
square feet of the earth’s surface, in the space of a few 
short hours, in the persons of a dozen or more people 
very much like ourselves, is enacted before our eyes 
the whole drama of sin and its consequence. Cause 
and effect, usually so illegible and obscure, are here fo- 
cussed into the same picture: sin the cause; its effect, 
the crucifying of God. 

The purpose of these “things that were wrought 
without is that they might be realized within.” Con- 
version would again become central to the Christian 
life, but the terms of it would be singularly piquant and 
exhilarating.* Conversion would consist, not as now of 


* See below, pp. 84 ff. 


THE CITY OF GOD fre 


an intellectual assent, or an emotional disturbance lead- 
ing nowhere in particular, but in the changing of the 
whole man by changing what he wants, or wills; it would 
transform his very instincts.* Within the individual 
would be achieved, under varying terms, the only 
progress that Christianity takes very seriously—that 
journey of the soul from the first to the second birth, 
that remaking of the natural man into the man he was 
meant to be, the man that God can use; in which pro- 
gression lies the seed and essence of all true progress, 
all true civilization. It would reveal an “‘inertia-break- 
ing, bond-breaking power, the mother of much explora- 
tive thought. . . . There you may find or recover the 
vision which nullifies all imposture of the Established, 
the Entrenched, of all the self-satisfied Toryisms, 
Capitalisms, Obscurantisms of the world.” f 

The second aspect of the renewal of the Church fol- 
lows almost automatically on the first. It is the reasser- 
tion of Christ’s Gospel of the Kingdom as an imminent 
reality, to be achieved upon this earth in the lives of 
men and women, so that the Church will again be seen 
as the emissary in an alien land of that civilization which 
awaits our daring. It will become again the sure con- 
viction of Christians that there is no salvation for so- 
ciety outside the Divine Society. Health for any State 
will be seen to consist in that wholeness which comes 
when it sees itself through the eyes of God—as a family, 
and its citizens as sons of a common Father, members 


* See W. E. Hocking, Human Nature and Its Remaking (second edition), 
pp. 171 and 366. (Yale University Press.) The reader’s particular at- 
tention is herewith invited to this valuable book. 

{ Ibid., p. 278. 


v2 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


of a Brotherhood of the Common Life, in which are 
embodied those relationships which prevail in the 
Father’s family; where God’s children may practise the 
ways and habits of their Father’s house. They will 
understand that this Brotherhood must stand open 
always, everywhere, and to all who would learn of that 
life and practise it. For the Church was never meant 
to be “‘an aggregation of like-minded pious individuals ~ 
who for mutual benefit agree to worship together”; not 
a club for respectable people, but a house, at unity with 
itself, for every member of God’s family. 

Then the makers of the kingdoms of this world will 
have to take the Christians seriously again (as their 
forebears had to take Jesus seriously), for anything 
may happen when the Word goes forth and God-seeking 
men and women, dissatisfied with present achievement, 
set foot again on that road that leads out to new fron- 
tiers. Even States must stand aside. Security and com- 
fort must wait; interest and profit do not count. Like 
Stephen the imprudent, they will stop at nothing till 
they see the heavens open. 

The third step in the regeneration of the Church will 
concern itself with the disentanglement of the Gospel 
from purely intellectual methods of presentation (for 
which it was only secondarily meant), and the renewal 
of the distinctive challenge of faith. Religion will again 
be revealed in its true aspect, as an invitation and op- 
portunity for needy souls to draw on all the resources 
of the Eternal. The disastrous loss of this central and 
distinctive functton of the Church has meant the loss 
also of its chief claim on people’s lives. They have 


THE CITY OF GOD 73 


learned to seek elsewhere for contact with the divine. 
Even M. Coué with his simple formula is nearer the 
heart of religion than many preachers. 

This loss has resulted in the discrediting of the ele- 
ment of mystery in life,—though, of course, there are 
other contributing causes. It is true that what was 
miraculous to our fathers has become commonplace to 
us, so that we seem to need no place for mystery in our 
categories. In an age of wonders there is left no room 
for wonder. For example, all the mystery is gone from 
fire, which man once worshipped as the source of life 
and as its chief mystery, ‘‘beautiful and joyful and ro- 
bust and strong’’; but to-day we clever folk carry fire 
around in our pockets on the end of a match-stick. And 
when one can buy lightning by the kilowatt, there is ne 
mystery left there, either. Hence we have no taste for 
the unexplained. Yet we cannot rid life of its mystery. 
“Tt is man’s own consciousness that is the abiding home 
of mystery; his littleness and greatness, his powers of 
sacrifice and joy, his need of sympathy and love.” * 
Religion, from its earliest to its most developed forms, 
is an expression of man’s sense of the mystery of his 
environment. If we callously deny to those early God- 
seers their burning bush, their angelic visitations, their 
miraculous healings—yes, and their risen and ascended 
Lord—we also deny ourselves the possibility of catch- 
ing any glimpse of God walking in our own gardens in 
the cool of day, or at our side as we journey along the 
road. In discarding the miraculous content of the an- 


_ *J. Neville Figgis, The Gospel and Human Needs, p. 45. (Longmans, 
London. By permission.) 


74 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


cient God-story we have lost a very precious thing, the 
awareness of the infusion of matter with the divine— 
the ever-recurrent miracle. The Church must engen- 
der an attitude toward all of God’s creation in which 
knowledge does not exclude wonder, or the sense of 
kinship shut out veneration. 

Such an attitude would help break down that wholly 
artificial and misleading separation between the sacred 
and the secular: Sunday is somehow holier than Monday; 
church buildings are “sacred,” while department stores, 
subways, factories, homes, gardens are “secular’’; 
prayer and Bible-reading seem valuable to the soul 
while buying and selling do not; God is the God of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but not of Tom, Dick, and 
Harry. In such a world the soul will come to its own 
once more. Then a certain gaiety, an unbounded de- 
light, will for a Christian surround this scene of things 
and events, for everywhere he will come upon hints, 
clues, symbols of the Altogether Lovely. Hints that 
this world of ours is penetrated through and through by 
a world within, unseen but not unknown, where one 
may taste hidden riches. This is the only true other- 
worldliness. Eternal life is not a faint insipid endless- 
ness of days shrouded in mists; one can possess it now 
and here, in the delicious present. For eternity is the 
supreme quality of days spent in the company of the 
Eternal. 

To complete its achievement in such a rebirth of 
faith, the Church must restore to us moderns the gift 
of worship. It must ignore all our protestations that 
worship is no longer necessary or possible, that the 
threshold into God’s court is too high for us, that it is 


THE CITY OF GOD 75 


only bootstrap-lifting—and all that. With a renewal of 
its ancient intuitions it must help us (in Professor 
Hocking’s phrase) “recover what children have not yet 
lost.” It must unite all our hearts again in the inter- 
cessions of the ages, ascending like thin gold chains to 
the throne of God. Such worship as we moderns need 
must have all the simple, dramatic clarity of the ele- 
mental human acts, for it {s itself an elemental act, 
the soul’s eating and drinking. It must be as obviously 
adapted to its purpose as breathing and eating and 
making love are to theirs. Theory and discourse about 
God, and exhortation to seek him, will never succeed 
in bringing the Hunger and the Thirst actually into 
God’s presence and filling it with his bounty. What 
man of you when his son asks for bread will give hin— 
jam? Pastoral handshakes and cordial greetings at the 
church door will never take the place of the divine 
Hospitality: “Come unto me, all ye heavy-laden and 
I will refresh you.” With what delight to our wearied 
and grimy souls, driven by the relentless calendar from 
one busy day to the next, should we turn aside from the 
crowded sidewalk into the door of some lofty sunlit 
church, and discover again for ourselves that within 
those doors other things matter. Or, perhaps even better, 
that there are no “other things.”” As we emerged again 
after our brief interval of worship, we should take along 
with us the awareness that life is more than the living, 
that God does not stop inside the great doors but comes 
with us to be our companion through the crowded hours. 

The Church must look again at her ancient task and 
see it with new eyes. Again its message must come to 
God’s children as good news: “to give knowledge of 


46 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, 
through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the 
Dawning from on high hath visited us, to give light to 
them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, 
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” 


PART ITI 


‘“‘Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! 
Away, O soul, hoist instantly the anchor! 
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! 
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? 
Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long 
enough? 


Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only! 

Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me; 
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, 
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all! 


O daring joy, but safe! 
Are they not all the seas of God?” 
WALT WHITMAN, “PASSAGE TO INDIA,” IN “LEAVES 
OF GRASS’’ (DAVID McKAY COMPANY). 


CHAPTER IX 
THE SEAS OF GOD 


This generation shall not pass away till all be ful- 
filled. Everywhere the tides are sweeping back into the 
stale and stuffy recesses of our souls. The ships of God, 
the treasure-ships of the Spirit, begin to lift free of the 
clinging mud. There is a stirring along their whole 
length, a gentle lift and swing before the rising water, a 
song of the crew on deck, and the Captain stands on 
the bridge. New voyages begin, to new continents and 
wider markets beyond the farther seas. They who are 
young at this hour need no longer play at adventures 
in backyard ponds with toy boats tied to a string. But 
like captains of old, in ill-found, unseaworthy ships, 
they make way against the storms and currents of un- 
charted seas. Their eyes strain to pierce the mists that 
hide half-glimpsed coast-lines; their feet are restless to 
press those untamed shores. “We are not yet at rest, 
nor can we believe we have enjoyed or seen enough to 
accomplish the ends of God.’ The hope of the world 
lies in this, that the undying energy of the human soul, 
its insurgent youthfulness, its insistent hunger for God, 
shall set sail before the free winds of his purpose, and 
in the company of that Captain who knows the way, 
press on over whatever tempestuous seas may lie be- 
tween to the Holy City, where dreams are actualities. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is at its best in times like 
these of ours. Its youth and vigor and charm reappear 

79 


80 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


from under the stuffy wrappings of sophisticated thought. 
It thrives and reaches its full stature; that pensive be- 
wilderment is gone; it knows its way and its work. For 
it was born into just this sort of spiritual climate. “The 
world into which Christianity first came was extraordi- 
narily like our own. Like ours, it was crushing men by 
its complexity. It was a war-weary world, baffled in its 
attempts at reconstruction, dazed by vast and bewil- 
dering transitions. Established social conditions were 
collapsing. Old ties and loyalties were being snapped, 
and the individual was left spiritually homeless and self- 
conscious in a cosmopolitan civilization. Noble aspira- 
tions there were in plenty—fine idealisms, kindness, 
courtesy—only there was no driving power. The dis- 
tinctive note was the note of disillusionment. Men 
longed for a fresh start which they could not get, for a 
deliverance they could not find, for a fellowship they 
could not achieve.” * 

Christianity, when it is true to itself, is in the world 
as a pilgrim and a stranger, and the world resists it 
stubbornly, hostile and unconverted. Only at the price 
of its true purpose does the Gospel ever seem to possess 
the whole community and become its established re- 
ligion; and when that happens it is time for the Word 
to go forth afresh. That time is now again at hand. 

Young men and women want to know in these days 
whether Christianity works. They are looking for some- 
thing that helps. If Christianity can give peace and 
guidance to a soul that is dragged this way and that, 
and stability and beauty to a world that seems to in- 


_*F.R. Barry, St. Paul and Social Psychology, p. 1. (Oxford Univer- 
sity Press, 1923. By permission.) 


THE SEAS OF GOD 81 


crease in complexity and dreariness, they are for it. 
But they have given up expecting this sort of thing of 
Christ’s Gospel. Yet some there are still willing to be- 
lieve that Jesus was right, that he really did understand 
us better than we do ourselves; that he “still lives, 
great and unexplained.” 

Our sophisticated theologies have imperceptibly over- 
laid, through the centuries of verbal and written exposi- 
tion of the Gospel, the loveliness and vigor of the actual 
Young Man who was Jesus. If it is the divine purpose 
to use a Young Man as a fit and adequate means of 
revealing God to us, then we have indeed been misled 
and deprived. For Jesus is permitted to seem a fussy 
and bad-tempered giver of rules and prohibitions, and 
more concerned with sins than with the people who 
commit them. He is preached as an intolerant Christ, 
setting forth this or that set of binding opinions. Our 
boys and girls have come to think that the Gospel is 
for practical purposes no more than a tedious discipline 
as irksome as an outworn contract. One readily under- 
stands why it is that while the churches are empty of 
young people, the universities are packed to overflow- 
ing. The churches have seemed to offer nothing but 
restraint; the universities seem to offer light and oppor- 
tunity. 

In a day when all eyes, young and old, await the 
dawn, it is not good that our Lord Jesus Christ should 
be conceived as middle-aged and dim-eyed and short of 
breath, for he is first among the watchers for the morn- 
ing. He was, and forever is, the Young Man. About 
him gathered the young in years and in spirit. Follow- 
ing Jesus required resiliency of soul and ability to swing 


82 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


free of the deepening rut of habit and expediency—the 
qualities of youth, of whatever age. He whom we see 
in the gospels has the heart as well as the years of youth. 
His is an exulting overflow of energy and joy in living 
which speaks a language that youth the world over 
understands. There came a young man running unto 
Jesus, saying, What shall I do to inherit eternal life— 
to live like you? Jesus meant release, voyages, discov- 
eries, to those young men who at his bidding sprang up 
from stifling tasks and followed him along a beckoning 
road in the morning dew, to find the “greater things” 
that they were to do in his company. The Gospel is 
young, as Jesus is young. When he returned to his 
Father and our Father, he took with him the soul of a 
Young Man. Youthfulness and all that it implies has 
eternally a part and function in the substance of the 
ever-living God, ‘‘Behold I make all things new.” 

If there is one question about religion which under- 
graduates ask more than any other, it is this: “‘ What is 
Christianity for? Where does it gear into the life that 
we must live? What is Jesus’ point? Has he any pro- 
posal that we can accept or reject?”? Most of their im- 
patience with current Christianity is because they can 
get no intelligible answer. 

Jesus came with a very definite and practicable pro- 
posal, which, translated into the tame prose of our day, 
reads something like this :—that men and women everywhere 
should, in their own persons, and in literal fact, set about 
living as well-beloved sons and daughters live in their own 
parents’ house in the midst of their own family. That we 
extend the family relationship to include every one of God’s 
children, and observe it in all our daily tasks and pleasures. 


THE SEAS OF GOD 83 


Or, more familiarly: Love God, and your neighbor as 
yourself. 

Rather a trite and commonplace proposal? Vision- 
ary and impractical? It is we who make it so. As for 
him, he made it both startlingly new and original, and 
supremely practicable. So enticing did he make it that 
there were those (not unlike ourselves) who gave them- 
selves to the doing of it. So possible did he exhibit it to 
be that they believed it already on the way to accom- 
plishment; and his enemies feared what might come of 
it, so they slew him on a tree. For look you, Jesus was 
no idle dreamer, no abstract theorist, no word-monger. 
He was not content with repeating the current common- 
places about righteousness and justice and love among 
men; nor did he write a masterly and convincing book 
about it; nor yet invite a few choice souls to come apart 
with him into some inviolate valley and establish God’s 
commonwealth there. Like Chaucer’s parson, “he 
taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.”’ His origin- 
ality consisted in his doing the obvious thing, the un- 
heard-of thing. For when his time was come this Young 
Man stepped forth from the door of his shop and began, 
without advertisement or display, yet in the full tide 
of the common life and in plain view, to live the life of 
a Son among his brethren in his Father’s house. In all 
that he did he acted simply and literally on that central 
fact that men are all brothers, sons of the Father. He 
preached what he practised; whole countrysides crowded 
to hear him. When they asked him what this meant 
that he was doing, he replied, ‘‘This is the way, walk 
ye in it.” He found one here and another there whom 
he needed to carry the Good News. To them he said, 


84 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


“Follow me”’; and daily he put them to their testing. 
He did this because before his Proposal can take effect on 
human affairs it must first take effect inside of us. Before 
he can use us in the Commonwealth of God, men and 
women of willow must be made into oak; unstable sand 
must be fused into rock; those held prisoner by their 
own paltry selves must first be set free. In his own 
words, one must be “born again.” Strange language 
that, with a tinge of the fantastic, in the abstract. It is 
an experience which must remain meaningless, even 
absurd, until we see it happen in those who took him at 
his word; indeed, until we try it for ourselves. His 
disciples all saw themselves through Jesus’ eyes; and 
what they saw made them over. That was Christianity 
to them, though they knew no such abstract word to 
describe it. It was not then, nor is it now, an artificial 
thing, but a recognition, a renewal, an enfranchisement. 


What an impoverishment, that Christianity should 
have come to seem a sitting-down religion! And that 
following Jesus Christ should have become only an in- 
tellectual assent to certain propositions, with nothing 
much to be done about it! How Jesus would laugh at 
that! Stern laughter, like a gale from heaven. He still 
comes to all who are young in heart with the same 
Proposal. 

If the modern disciple, the young man who comes 
running, asking ‘‘What shall I do?” would fulfil Jesus’ 
evident intention, let him take him quite literally at 
his word. When he wakes up to the fact that life is 
binding and not freeing him, when effort seems mean- 
ingless, when his hands reach about for some means of 


THE SEAS OF GOD 85 


release, for some task really worth his best, and cannot 
find it, then let him know himself as one to whom the 
Proposal aptly applies. Let him wind up all his affairs 
and fulfil all his engagements without unnecessary de- 
lay, and set forth on an apprenticeship of soul in Jesus’ 
company. Not just for a summer vacation but for one 
year at least, through all the heat and cold of the four 
seasons. Let him go out into the common life of his 
people where bread is earned, where wounds are given 
and received, and let him live as Jesus did, as if this 
world were indeed the Father’s house. Let him take 
that for granted, and act in all things as if others did 
so too, spreading an infectious good-will over every re- 
lationship. He will not preach any gospel, but will ex- 
plain, as Jesus did when occasion arose, what it means 
that he is doing. Talk, that depreciated currency, will 
be retired in favor of a more valid coinage. These jour- 
neymen of Christ will as a matter of course earn their 
own living at jobs as nearly as possible consistent with 
the central principle of Brotherhood. They will shortly 
see how much of the world’s work under present con- 
ditions is consistent with that principle. They will have 
their eyes wide open to all that goes on in the Father’s 
house, with a singularly fresh vision, unspoiled by the 
conventional acquiescences, and awake to all that con- 
tradicts God’s will. They will be neither for nor against 
any particular institution, save only “the institution of 
the dear love of comrades,” that new City of Friends 
waiting their building and that of other hardy souls 
touched with the same madness from beyond the bor- 
ders of this world. 

The varied and vivid adventures of these fools of 


86 THE RELIGION OF UNDERGRADUATES 


Christ will make great telling: a new Book of Acts to 
stir the hearts of all who are young in a tired world. No 
doubt it will be a story of hard work, spare diet, poverty, 
failure, enemies, of stripes and imprisonments perhaps; 
but it will be no less the story of how on every hand 
they found good-will, waiting only to be invited forth, 
telling a thing about “‘the dim common populations” 
quite forgotten by us moderns, but which indicates that 
Jesus was right about us after all. There is something 
swelling in humanity now like sap in trees in the spring- 
time, an impatience with “‘aged fierce enigmas, strangling 
problems,” which tells of a ripeness for this high adven- 
ture. The call goes forth. Jesus stands looking for the 
young men and the young women to rediscover with 
them the open secret of all life, that the Kingdom of 
God is in our midst, waiting to be recognized and pos- 
sessed, 

The logic of this application of the Proposal either 
needs no defense, or else it is impossible of defense at 
all. Either one gets it or one does not. Most will call it 
a fool’s errand. From the point of view of the longer 
heads it is no doubt just that. Nevertheless, it should 
not be regarded as a Quixotic fancy, a romantic escapade, 
a dropping of the obvious tasks and duties of daily life, 
but as a preparation, an apprenticeship, for the better 
doing of those very tasks. While this suggestion does 
not stand or fall by the approval of the ‘“‘best minds,” 
it has certain practical aspects not to be ignored: (zx) It 
would be a discipline, self-administered and self-explan- 
atory. It would teach the self-reliance of a true disciple- 
ship (which means discipline) to youth in a ‘soft and 
sheltered age: no scrip, no purse, no dress-suit, no letter 


THE SEAS OF GOD 87 


of introduction. (2) M would give a unifying objective 
to lives that are distracted with too many things. Much 
would be regained that has been denied them by the 
. very luxuriance of their equipment and opportunity. 
(3) They would see for themselves the world in which 
they are to live, under decidedly educative circum- 
stances. And they would earn their own living, which 
nine out of ten boys the world over must do at their 
age. (4) While they would lose or postpone a year of 
college, and might fall behind temporarily in their 
marks, this seems trivial in the presence of the fact that 
the soul of a whole generation is in danger of falling 
behind. On their return to college they would be far 
better able to appropriate those things for which edu- 
cation exists. | 

It is not beyond possibility that such a realistic in- 
terpretation of Jesus’ Proposal might actually meet the 
spiritual needs of some at least among the youth of this 
generation, if it were undertaken in the spirit of disciple- 
ship, informed by the Holy Spirit, and later followed by 
its true sequel of identification with daily tasks in the 
same Spirit. A key, a small thing in itself, can unlock 
mighty doors, if it fits the lock. If the young men and 
women of to-day, in the shut places of their souls, were 
once to catch a whiff of Jesus’ hardihood and divine 
audacity, one would hardly dare predict what might 
come of it. The times await that flinging open of all 
our doors and windows, that stepping forth to accept 
the only proposal that seems to offer any hope at all. 


' 


cA (ays 
ye } Ns 














n Theolo Lib 


hii 
1 . 6 


(wil 
012 01232 6296 
































Date Due 
we ie Nie ah Genet 
pieitE CHEE ti 
FACULT 
hides 
































a 


AA) 
Ny 








